Bio Inc. Redemption by DryGin Studios is an interesting medical simulation game that plants you in the position of Life or Death. It manages to find a happy medium for people who like to get in-depth with information and those who just like to tap for rewards. It’s a challenging experience even on the starting difficulties and can be hard to find your medical flow. Players are given a patient with a randomized set of symptoms to investigate. Through collecting cells that appear in the many systems of the body, players earn Bio Points. With Bio Points, players can run tests and treatments that may help to save the patient’s life.
Finding the right tests to run essentially comes down to tapping the symptoms and finding the disease where symptoms overlap. Once you have gotten some positive tests back, you spend Bio Points on treatments for the disease. You can spend points on upgrades to your resource collection and a variety of lifestyle changes that will improve your patient’s resistances in certain areas. For example, suggesting yoga improves the patients bone strength, a Mediterranean diet for the digestive system and so on. Getting started can be a little slow, as you need to read the detailed information on the symptoms that your patient has, the tests that you can run and the treatments that are available.
Not a substitute for a medical degree
As time progresses, your patient will develop new symptoms. Existing symptoms worsen over time so players have to be quick in collecting Bio Points and taking test samples. All tests and treatments take time to run, which can really up the intensity when your patient is barely holding on. It can also be one of the more annoying parts of the game as the cells don’t hang around long and you need to constantly be watching. Points can be slow to generate and more valuable cells can disappear within a moment. Actually collecting the resource takes time too as you have to hold down on the cell but this can be upgraded with Bio Points.
Anyone familiar with the studio’s other game, Plague Inc., will grasp the game’s resource mechanic very quickly as they share a lot of similarities. Players essentially wait for points to develop, they spend the points on upgrades and perks and repeat the process until the game ends. There are spontaneous events that happen that can either help or hinder you. If you happen to get one at the right time, it can feel like a miraculous stroke of luck for your doctor.
Medically macabre
If you get tired of saving people’s lives you have the option of playing as Death instead. Naturally, the objective of this mode is to kill the patient by worsening their symptoms. You can also operate on some notable figures like Adolf Hitler, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. If you’re eager to finally settle which of your friends has the most medical knowledge, you can face off in a multiplayer game. One player acts as the doctor and the other plays as Death.
Bio Inc Redemption‘s graphics are nice to look at but the same aesthetic loses its appeal over multiple games. During games, you have an x-ray of your patient’s various systems which, with my lack of medical expertise, I can only say resembled my Leaving Cert biology books pretty well. Your patient’s figure will engage in a healthier diet, lift weights, do stretches etc. when you make lifestyle changes. They’ll ache with pain in whatever areas are affected. Plus the occasional blood spurt when things are looking bad.
Far, far cheaper than a medical degree
Bio Inc. Redemption has the option of in-game purchases which give you coins and resources. You can choose to upgrade your Doctor/Death abilities or to spend coins on a variety of perks to give you a head start on treating the patient. One downside is that you are only given 36 energy to use before needing to recharge. Treating a patient on Intern difficulty takes 6 energy but the cost rises with the difficulty level.
Casual players shouldn’t need to worry about using all of their energy very quickly. With Lethal being the highest difficulty for each stage with a cost of 24 energy, those looking for a more challenging experience may find themselves out of things pretty quickly. Once your initial rewards are used, rebuilding them naturally can be slow. It can be a drag grinding but there are daily challenges and goals to help you out. Or you can spend a little to get a boost.
So what’s the diagnosis?
Bio Inc. Redemption is free on the App Store and Play Store and costs €12.99 outside of a sale on Steam. It gets tedious swapping between systems and collecting points but the game is a lot of fun to play. I found it a lot more enjoyable to play in short bursts to ease the more tedious issues but there is a lot of replayability to find here. You might also pick up a bit of medical knowledge on the way.
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