Containment

The game is rather frustrating since it does not explain its mechanics. This would be fine, if this was intended as a casual time-wasting clicker. And the game does give this impression. However, one of the three tutorial levels is on achieving a high-score. Apparently, the devs intended the game to have a strategy element. Also fine. But, please, do explain the whole mechanics! At the start of each level a number of stats are given for the bacteria. What do they mean? How is the strength of the bacteria each turn determined? And what is it important for? Questions, over questions, over questions. And what is with the 5 turns limit per level? Give unlimited turns and award stars for finishing withing certain amount of turns, if you like that. Or introduce difficulty levels that control the amount of turns available. And giving stars just for score? Honestly, I do not understand why the others so much like this game. It is a strategic nightmare. Well, maybe I approached the game with the wrong expectations.

This is another one of those small cute logic puzzles that fall into the same genra like the Cat Machine or Evo Explores. However, unlike those titles, Containment offers some random elements and options to customize levels that make each game unique, taking it beyond the "play once and you're done" limitation of those games. Gameplay itself is rather simple as you simply have to decide which bacteria to kill with your antibotic dosages each turn. However, clever application of the dosages can help you kill more than just the bacteria it was applied to. Also, saving your doses for future turns can make them more powerful, but does so at the cost of allowing the bacteria stronger growth. Finally, since the score is based on how many bacteria you kill, there is a benefit in letting them live. So the game is constantly forcing you to create a balance between letting bacteria live for a higher score, but needing to kill enough to prevent them from growing out of control. At the end of the day, I wouldn't consider this complex or deep, but it is entertaining and unique if you are looking for a casual puzzle game. For the $2 price tag you will easily get your money's worth provided you enjoy these kinds of games. The developers are also still offering support and making updates for the game, which is more than I would have expected from a low cost title. Two solid thumbs up!

[h1]Containment[/h1] Entretenido juego de estrategia de contener bacterias y sus oleadas reproductivas. Este tiene varios pasos: -Con los puntos de medicina tendremos que eliminar/debilitar/bacterias o guardar esos puntos para aumentar el nivel de investigación (y así nuestra medicina sea más potente). -Se restará un punto a cada bacteria -Las aisladas se eliminaran -Las bacterias que queden vivas se reproduciran por mitosis [u][b]Pros:[/b][/u] ✅ Da buena idea de la velocidad de reproducción de las bacterias. ✅ Mecánicas muy bien pensadas. [u][b]Contras:[/b][/u] ❌ Gráficos feotes a lo power point del 2000 (aunque no se necesitan más). ❌ Llega a ser extremadamente difícil una vez superadas varias fases. [u][b]Conclusión:[/b][/u] Entretenido y curioso juego de estrategia de contener bacterias y sus oleadas reproductivas. [h2]Nota: [b]6,5/10[/b][/h2] [u][h2][url=steampowered.com/curator/45277685]🎮🌵Más reseñas en mi mentor🌵🎮[/url][/h2][/u]

An engaging puzzle game, with simple, but challenging mechanics. The game is highly polished and relaxing to play. You can see the top 50 scores for each level, and it's fun seeing how high you can reach. There are only a small number of levels, but there is more than enough content to justify the very reasonable price.

Short but clever puzzle game, with deeper strategy than you'd expect. Unbeatable value for the price

Really charming puzzle game that's always refreshing itself with new mechanics. Can't tell if I love seeing the leader board at the beginning of each level or hate it, because it makes me want to just stay on that level till I can place (I didn't, but i tried :)) Definitely worth the price.

Containment (aka FRContainment) is a console (Switch) ported minimalist 2D "block" placement puzzle game. To explain the game as best possible, you're presented with a hex grid with a number of "bacteria" of various strengths on it. The game works in phases. The first phase, you have a limited number of "doses" which cover 7 concentric hexes, and reduces the strength of each bacteria by 1 point (eliminating any at strength 1). Once you're satisfied, you can click "end turn", at which point, all bacteria on the board lose another point. The final phase, all remaining bacteria that don't share a tile edge with another bacteria are destroyed. If there's any left, well, you did it wrong. So, the objective is to eliminate or carefully isolate bacteria with your limited doses. It's a novel concept but, for a PC game, very limited in terms of the experience and the technical implementation is lacking. The game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard. While there are options to change the resolution for the game, all this does is scale up the simplistic low quality vector art assets used to make the game, which makes little or no difference to the graphics quality. Without any other substantial graphics tweaks, it's not possible for gamers to improve the mediocre 2D visuals. The game features extremely lazy, minimalist "art", of the type you normally expect to see in low effort Flash/browser games and mobile apps. Considering this is being evaluated as a PC game, having the graphics phoned in like this isn't going to result in a high quality, visually impressive game that PC gamers are used to seeing. The controls can't be customised because the game has such a dumbed down, simplified interface that it's just iPhone screen tapping stuff. The fact that the interface is this dumbed down might be seen as a problem in itself, however... this is a fairly shallow experience if you're the kind of gamer that likes to play games with deep, rich control schemes and interaction. You'll get none of that here. Because this is designed for consoles, it carries a number of deliberate design deficiencies. Compromises were made to cater to the inferior console gaming appliances that the game was designed for. These are unfortunate compromises and limitations that PC gamers shouldn't be forced to accept, but it's evident that PC was a second thought for the console-centric developers. The game is deficient as a result of these choices, and would have been so much better without the handicaps that designing games for consoles forces upon a game. This looks and feels like a mobile app, but I wasn't able to find it on the app stores. Maybe it was removed, maybe it was rejected by Apple and Google (they do have more rigorous quality standards than Valve does for Steam, after all). This is surprising because the game seems to be designed for mobile phones and that's where the appropriate target audience would be. Regardless, for all intents and purposes Containment might as well be a mobile app, it has the same limitations and dumbed down qualities. It's impossible to recommend such a game to PC gamers. We don't spend all this money building gaming rigs so we can pretend they're iPhones and play games that might as well be mobile apps. These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game. The poor quality of this game is reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was only 12 players. This is a remarkably low number, and now, the only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 50,000 games for gamers to choose from (over 9,000 completely free titles), the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected. Containment is relatively cheap at $2 USD, but it's not worth it. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, this is impossible to recommend. Because this is the kind of game you can just play for free on mobile phones, it's impossible to recommend anyone should pay money for the same experience on Steam.

A few years ago this would've been a flash game (probably free, probably completely surrounded by ads). Flash is on its way out and it's not 100% clear what (if anything) is going to replace it. I think there's space here for small games that you can explore for a few hours. I think with a nicer coat of paint and some more content this game could easily push up into the $5-$10 range.

This game has some really neat, clever, and fun elements to it, but the core of gameplay is NOT "try your best to eliminate the bacteria". It is "let the bacteria multiply enough so that when you wipe them out, your score hits the thresholds for earning more stars". 3-starring levels is not, ultimately, a matter of clever strategy, but a matter of correctly judging the inflection point where you need to stop letting bacteria grow so you can wipe them out. Every turn, you determine how many to kill / leave alive either by (a) seat-of-the-pants estimation or (b) really tedious calculation. This is clearly intentional; the game even has tips reminding you about it. There's more nuance than this to the game (much of it neat and clever) but that's the beating heart of gameplay, and I found it kind of hollow - the tension feels contrived. (And weirdly athematic.)

[u]In short:[/u] This is a fun light-weight casual strategy game for a few hours. It has an incredibly polished surface, but lacks a bit in depth. Fortunately this is more than adequatly reflected by the price tag. [u]In long:[/u] The specific [b][u]mechanics[/u][/b] take a while to grok, but the basic gist is that bacteria will spawn and increase in strength on a hexagonal grid. You can either administer doses to certain tiles or pass the turn. Once your turn is over every tile loses 1 strength and every isolated tile dies off, but then the remaining bacteria multiply. If you have doses remaining, they will count towards reasearch, making your antibiotics more powerful. Your [b][u]strategy[/u][/b] lies in balancing your needs. Do you attempt to beat the bacteria down early or do you save up to make each dose hit harder later-on? Overcoming the bacteria is just part of the challenge and usually quite easy. The whole game instead revolves around scoring the highest number of points, partly to achieve a full 3-star-rating and also to get onto the leaderboards. So your goal is actually to keep the bacteria alive for as long as the turn limit allows, so you can score the maximum points off of killing them repeatedly. This is where the game honestly loses me a bit. It took me way too long to wrap my head around the growth mechanic, but that is partly the fault of a now-fixed bug. Worse though, the distribution of bacteria during the growth phase and even during the initial setup of the level is [i]heavily randomized[/i]. While this arguably adds replayability, it feels really bad, that how good your start is and how big of a score you'll be able to get is up to RNG and not skill. This neatly brings us to the [b][u]levels[/u][/b]. The game comes with the original 9 maps, with 5 bonus maps added recently for free. As the reference to heavy RNG has probably already tipped you off, these are not hand-crafted puzzle/challenge levels. Instead the whole game is bascially 1 sandbox level with different pre-set parameters (grid size, growth per turn, doses per turn, etc). At least after beating the 9 original levels the game gives you direct access to said parameters in a so-called "creative mode", which is essentially a level generator. I found the bonus levels to be a lot more interesting, where the developers thankfully decided to mix it up with more interesting map layouts. With respect to the [b][u]difficulty[/u][/b], the game is a bit of a rollercoaster. Some levels are very easy and open-ended score challenges. Others have very tight tolerances that basically require a certain near-optimal strategy just to survive and will necessitate several resets to score well. Overall beating all 14 "pre-made" levels with full 3 stars took me a little more than 4 hours. If you are into highscoring or into experimenting with the level generator, there's a lot more hours to be had for sure. The [b][u]presentation[/u][/b] is done [i]very[/i] well. The game looks slick and polished with good attention to detail. Sound effects are great and the music is good. I'm equally satisfied with the [b][u]technical implementation[/u][/b]. The options left literally nothing to be desired: volume sliders, windowed mode, animation speed slider, ability to turn-off animated backgrounds - I love it! Seriously, this should serve as a shining example for other games' option menus. Two bugs I reported were also fixed within a day, which is quite impressive. In [b][u]conclusion[/u][/b] I can't say much more than that I had fun and that I enjoyed the concept. While I definitely have minor gripes with the game, I had an over-all mostly enjoyable experience. Looking at the price tag, even the developers seem to know that their game is a little shallow, so I can hardly fault them for that. The game is well worth the full price of merely 2 bucks for a few hours of casual fun.