It's addictive, but not fun. You keep making progress and unlocking things, but they hardly change anything.

There are very few viable strategies for wiping out the earth, and often it comes down to luck. Basically, soon after your disease is detected, earth starts researching a cure. This starts a timer - you have to infect and then kill everyone before the cure is made, because once there's a cure it's impossible to win. There's no fighting against treatments or disease resistance or immunity or anything like that - you just spread, kill, and hope that you're faster than the cure. It's incredibly repetitive.

The ape and vampire campaigns are a bit different and a bit more fun - you can actually undo some of the work toward a cure by destroying labs. But there still isn't that enough interactivity with the world to be fun - you just choose the right upgrades at the right times, and occasionally attack specific targets as soon as they appear.

The most frustrating bit is that is often you'll get to the end-game and suddenly you'll stop receiving DNA to buy upgrades. You could be the most successfully contagious disease on earth and suddenly be unable to evolve any lethality. Losing always feels so arbitrary - as if you were playing an RPG and you kept getting one-kit-killed by invisible enemies.

It's addictive, but not fun. You keep making progress and unlocking things, but they hardly change anything. There are very few viable strategies for wiping out the earth, and often it comes down to luck. Basically, soon after your disease is detected, earth starts researching a cure. This starts a timer - you have to infect and then kill everyone before the cure is made, because once there's a cure it's impossible to win. There's no fighting against treatments or disease resistance or immunity or anything like that - you just spread, kill, and hope that you're faster than the cure. It's incredibly repetitive. The ape and vampire campaigns are a bit different and a bit more fun - you can actually undo some of the work toward a cure by destroying labs. But there still isn't that enough interactivity with the world to be fun - you just choose the right upgrades at the right times, and occasionally attack specific targets as soon as they appear. The most frustrating bit is that is often you'll get to the end-game and suddenly you'll stop receiving DNA to buy upgrades. You could be the most successfully contagious disease on earth and suddenly be unable to evolve any lethality. Losing always feels so arbitrary - as if you were playing an RPG and you kept getting one-kit-killed by invisible enemies.