COVID: The Outbreak Reviews

Honestly, I find the game tedious and boring. I thought I was going to enjoy managing a pandemic as I do like the board game "Pandemic Legacy" but this is just... it's just slow. It's uninteresting and yet extremely complex. Just not the game for me I guess but I can't recommend it at all. It's a no from me.

It's very interesting to see how a Global Health Organisation has to deal with a huge global pandemic having very limited resources. The game allows me to look at the pandemic from a different perspective.

Its really nice simulation game from strategical point of view. A bit hard to manage how to play. After 24 hours of game play I have managed few strategies. This game really helps to understand seriousness of situation.

This game has a huge learning curve and there isn't much information available to help learn but once you can grasp the mechanics of the game it is fun. I love the challenge it provides and the need for strategy to weigh how the game is going to go.

I bought this based on the fact it is part of a charitable cause to contribute towards the crisis. This developer has found a way to not only provide some interesting facts about the situation, and find a way to sustain the livelihoods for some of the individuals involved in the development, but also support an effort to the cause in a meaningful way that they can. Thank you!

This game could have been great if it wasn't left unfinished. There are some nasty bugs. For example, it's possible to have 0 infected people (you managed to cure everyone without a vaccine) but the game doesn't end and after some time there is a new infection. How? If no one has the virus, how does a new person after 6-12 months or after an event get infected? Other than that, would be great if there were a bit more learning materials for the game. But I guess that didn't happen due to the low interest. It's really disappointing because I believe that this game had a lot more potential and is way better than another very popular game in the same genre.

It's an interesting concept, and the overall gameplay is interesting to me, but the problem is, I have absolutely no idea how to play. The UI is not very good, but even with a tutorial, I have absolutely no idea what I'm supposed to be doing. The tutorial is very good at explaining basic concepts that anyone who has played a game before would know how to do, but doesn't explain systems unique to this game itself. Buildings are prohibitively expensive to the point where you can't build them for 90% of the game, actions all have an RNG chance of being implemented, so you can just fail to do what needs to be done. And even when you do get buildings built, there is zero feedback on what they've done. Okay, I've built a medical center that is supposed to increase curability. Guess what, that's not even a data point you can find, so how do I know what that building did to justify the cost? You can't! And it says that every country that is within the range of the building will get the effect. But it's not clear if the circle just needs to cross a border of a country, or if it needs to cover one of the building slots. Again, because there is absolutely zero feedback on any actions you take or buildings you make, I can't even test this out with trial and error. I literally am playing a game where I can't see any of my actions impact the world at large. It's possible I'm doing something and it's having an impact, but it's also possible that I'm looking at a screensaver and nothing I do has any impact. I can't find any evidence to suggest otherwise. And more importantly, the whole vaccine element is never explained. It's not clear how you're supposed to assemble it, you're supposed to put colors in certain circles, and wait to see if there's a match. But there's no way of knowing what you did before, so I hope you're writing down on pen and paper what combinations you've tried in the past, because the game won't tell you. And even if it succeeds, I have no idea how to distribute it. In short, it's a game that has a lot of data available to you and a lot of actions, but due to terrible documentation, a very difficult to navigate UI, and and extraordinarily scarce resources, you just kind of sit and watch the world burn, helpless to act because no one will tell you what to do. It's been out long enough now where if it was gonna get better, it would have, so I'd avoid.

A game that reducers players to the role of spectator. This game has clearly been rushed to market without much thought to the gaming experience. One main weakness of 'Covid: The Outbreak' is it's refusal to let player's implement policies, and the complete lack of explanation as to why not. So for example you have an early outbreak in France, and want to 'Close Schools', or even 'Close Land Borders'. Think again, when you try back comes a message "You don't meet the requirements". Why not? The game doesn't bother to tell you. It's the same right across the globe. All you can do is constantly return to a country (there are 175 I think) and constantly click through all the options until eventually one is accepted, every turn. Tedious doesn't begin to describe it. A well thought out game like Civ 6 for example, always explains why a player can't do something, so they know how to. Moreover once you have finally got a policy accepted, you'll probably get this message a couple of minutes later "You have failed to implement Close land borders in France", even though it was accepted at the time. Then there's the lack of explanation on various displayed parameters. Hovering the mouse over a percentage indicator for example would in a well thought out game tell you what it is showing, but not in Covid. So once again you're in the dark. The game moves along, and you never really feel you are anything other than a spectator, unable to shape events. Maybe that's the idea, if that's your idea of fun, this game is for you. It's not for me. More fun would be to take real control of a country or region and see if you can New Zealand style, prevent the virus from spreading, develop a vaccine, help others, develop bubbles with others countries etc etc. Trying to play the role of a global authority where nothing can be achieved isn't enjoyable. It may be that the developers of the game were simply trying to make a political point. In which case it was at our expense. I just wasted £11 on this junk, and I'm not happy about it.

I expected some rushed cash-grab type of game especially in this price but i must say im shocked. Game is very very solid with lots of statistics, graphs and options. I haven't seen any bugs yet. I would describe it as grand strategy-ish reverse plague inc. I recommend it for all Paradox games fans as fun game to chill in the evening. Also its good because devs support cure research with 20% of earings from sales! If i had to point out cons i would say that some things might be a bit illegible and confusing at the begining but after 30 mins its not a problem.

Update: As you can see, the developers have replied to my review and have asked me to reconsider my review, so I've launched the game again. At the time of this writing (11 June 2020), they only things that were fixed were the game-breaking bugs that I didn't encounter this time, and moving the camera with the WASD keys. Everything else stayed exactly the same, from the confusing buildings to confusing research trees to terrrible optimization that still takes half a minute so have the game. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Honestly, when I first saw this I immediately thought "well, looks like another cash grab riding on the coronavirus theme". However, the game really surprised me. It has a ton of depth, a huge amount of mechanics, very interesting balancing (you play as the GHO, and the worse the pandemic gets the more money you get, so it incentivizes you to balance panic and your budget). Overall I think it's a pretty solid strategy game, sort of a mix between Plague Inc and a Paradox game. The biggest problem is that game is far from perfect and has quite a lot of issues for me to enjoy it at the moment: 1) The tutorial explains a lot of obvious things (for example that the fear level overlay shows you, can you guess it? Fear levels across the world! Who would have known) and doesn't explain a lot of important information (for example, how vaccine development works? What exactly does medicine do? What is "money influence"?). Worst of all, it doesn't explain how to actually play and win at the game, so you are left in the dark. 2) The research and decrees screens are very confusing. It's really hard to say if you are researching anything at the moment or not, and the layout is just as confusing (instead of having one research screen, there are about five different research trees on separate screens) 3) There are a lot of actions in the game, and initially, you have a very limited budget - may be enough for one or two. The problem is that it's very hard to see the impact of your actions - for example, I've decided to build a medical center in Germany. Did I do good? I have no idea. The game desperately needs some sort of summary tab to see how well you're doing. 4) Also, the UI needs some fixes as well, it's not the easiest to use. One thing that really stood out having to click a separate button at the bottom control panel to open up a country menu - instead of, I don't know, left/right-clicking on a country maybe? 5) The optimization is terrible. I'm playing on a 2080Ti with a Core i9 processor and 64GB of RAM, and it takes around 15(!!!!!!) seconds to even save the game. 6) There are a lot of bugs in the game, especially at the start. And I'm talking about game-breaking bugs: I've had to restart two times already - once because all countries spawned without medicine, another because all countries spawned without a workforce. 7) Some countries are separated into different parts, and that is never explained in the game. For example, the USA has four parts inside, but all of them are referred to as "the USA", so what is that supposed to mean? 8) The came movement is tied to the arrow keys, and there is no way to remap it to WSAD Overall, it's a fun game that hopefully will be improved in the future, but right now it has far too many issues for me to recommend it.