Big Pharma

I really wish they'd make a Sequel. Very fun!

Great little game, but planning your production chains, especially for high-end drugs, can become very annoying, as there is no way to cross your conveyor belts.

It's a visually cool and well designed game. It's boring though. It's the type of game that would be phone to play when you're killing time on your phone, but not an engaging desktop game at all.

[h1][b]Drug Running[/b][/h1] A drug tycoon game which is also some kind of arcady assembly chain puzzler. The puzzle elements come from each drug processing machine having a specific shape that you cannot change, but wish you could. So it's a little bit like trying to fit these in your rooms like tetris blocks. The tycoon bits come from trying to fulfil the various objectives of your scenario, which is almost never about producing the best medice to fight worldwide disease, but has all to do with making bucks, by increase the profit margins and cutting corners. [h1] Small risk of headaches [/h1] Just like pharma companies do IRL, the fun comes from stuffing your pills with nasty side effects and giving them fancy names. The less interesting bits are the constant scratching your head to painfully combine the same drugs over and over again in repeated playthroughs, as despite the varied scenarios, the base mechanics never change. Like a drug, the game is still pretty good and addictive when played in moderate quantities, with a small risk of headaches.

This is a fun tycoon / puzzle game with an interesting theme that takes itself just the right amount of serious, and a sense of humor. I've lost hours playing not realizing. The game time moves along in ticks as part of a day which are pause-able anytime real time, including multiple times faster speeds. You're a CEO / lead of a corporation making various drugs/medications for different ailments, with various goals and challenges to meet you can select from. The challenges are things like making more than an amount of money in a set time, or curing/treating a set number of people of a high tier disease within a set time, among other things. There's easy/medium/hard goals that you can go for where you might need to make way more in the time for the medium and hard difficulties. You don't choose the difficulty as a setting, the harder ones generally boil down to how much MORE you can min-max towards a goal, but the easy ones are very attainable with knowledge of the game and a plan. You have base ingredients which have a bar for Effects (good/wanted) and one or more for Side Effects (bad/unwanted). There's a small range within each bar that has a maximum that fades out each point outside that either way with most of the bar nothing. Each substance has a value representing its concentration which determines where on the bars it is. You want the concentration to be as close to the maximum Effect to help customers, but either outside the Side Effects or as far from the max from it as possible balanced against Effect strength. Sometimes you might want the effect a bit weaker, if it means you can have no side effects hurting your customers... which means more people will buy it and be willing to pay more usually. The gameplay mechanics of how you make drugs which you see in the screenshots is you're staring at a warehouse. They have multiple doors along the walls for input/output. You can designate them as input of one of the ingredients you currently have access to, each instance of which will cost a certain amount of money, then conveyor belts to machines, then to a door as the final result when you're satisfied with the concentration of the ingredient to sell as a drug. The machines themselves will increase or decrease the concentration primarily which costs a certain amount per use, ones for the ingredients becoming drug forms like pills or needles and more. They have a very specific place for input, and one for output you must respect leading to the puzzle aspect of the game as your warehouse space is limited, especially at first... though you can pay to expand your allowed area/s later, and you usually want to try to "tetris" the machines and belts as packed in as possible to put as many lines with exactly the concentration you want. Since each activation of each machine along the process is a cost you often have a choice: Make less money the more min-maxed effects with no side effects due to all the processing, OR plop out something cheap that will maybe work with horrible side effects for a lot less and rake in the profits as long as people need your medicine and there's no better/cheaper competition. You can set the price of your medicines as whatever you want to undercut all competition, or price gouge customers as much as you can & are willing to. That's just one layer of gameplay. Another major screen is the research of your company. You have researchers, and explorers. You start out with a couple ingredients but you can send out explorers various places who take some time to find other ingredients in the wild after-which you'll have access to it that game to import from a door. There's also a variety of research options for your company like different machines, a go-to early is ones that increase or decrease concentration by 3 steps instead of one, and more corporate business things.

As someone from the pharmaceutical industry and a fan of automation games, I was very excited to find this game. I like the idea of using various catalysts, but it is of course too simple to make cancer cure just through changing concentration... However, you forget about these unreasonable settings after hours, because this game is just so HARD!!! For some of levels it is even hard to get the lowest rating, and half of my total game time is spent on getting 20 master rating for the achievement. Each level was at least 1 hour and you only get to know at the end that the hour is wasted because you can't get that rating this time. At the end of the day it becomes more and more frustrating to just keep restarting with no progress. I would still recommend this game if you enjoy automation games. It was quite fun for the first 50 hours. I see a lot of potential in this game's mechanism and I hope there can be more games extending its ideas. And a hint for whoever's like me and didn't realize this earlier. You would think that the setting of each level is set. It is NOT. The level has random starting raw material, and all materials are random combinations of catalysts, side effects and curing effects. Even the debt is random. You get different debt amount and percentage when restarting the same level. This means that the same level can vary a lot on difficulty. If you find yourself bad luck with a lot of the catalyst/side effect slots, don't waste your time on it. Just restart. The cure's upgrade condition and route as well as their effective concentration range, are fixed. Once you are familiar with them, you could plan ahead for a lot of the things.

There isn't much of a game. The purpose of the game is to build a factory to to construct things using the recipes but this game falls way short of every other game in this genre. - The UI is really bad. I don't think this game was sufficiently play tested. Every think you do, from planning your recipes to building your factory is very annoying. - The game has very little depth and there are not any challenges or puzzles to build or overcome. - You are constantly waiting for income with nothing to do or plan. this game is closer to an idler game than a strategy game. - The recipes build onto each other but the design of the game makes you have to destroy and rebuild your factory to produce the higher level recipes rather than utilize the existing ingredients that you were creating. This game feels more like a parody of the bad tycoon games that I bought as a kid than an actual game on its own.

Least intuitive UI and game schema I have ever encountered. Basically every other factory/economy game ever made is more playable.

I've really tried to force myself to like this game. But it's boring and tedious.

its a litte production line sim with company competetivess, let your scientists research new technologies, let your scouts find new things in the wild and come out ontop against other drug manifacturers. ♥♥♥♥ block with patents, the ultimate move. The game comes with scenarios which can be fun to play, theres a sandbox mode with unlimited cash, or just a general custom game where you set the goals, play alone or against other companies (computer enemies). I heard some things about it not being intuitive but i cant say much about that as i would have faced those problems years ago, i think its pretty simple. The marketing and malpractice dlc is a nice addition, adding booster effects to the game that can raise sales when mixed in. Also it gives you the ability to smear other companies and other nasty tactics like falsifying study results to boost your own sales but beware of the bad press. If youre looking to buy this game i can recommend the dlc.