Big Pharma Review – drugs not only from Heisenberg

Leading a pharmaceutical company is a hard, day-to-day work where you have to deal with strict legislation, constantly mutating viruses, and epidemics that increase the demand for particular drugs. The quest to help humanity is a noble one, obviously, but there are things that have to be endured, if you decide to follow that path. Big Pharma itself makes for a wonderful illustration – what is seemingly very simple, in reality turns out to be demanding, challenging and very complex.

The game from Twice Circled is a mix of a puzzle game and economic strategy. Your task is to develop original pharmaceutical drugs that will gain a positive recognition from the clients and generate enough revenue for the company to stay in business. To achieve that, you need production lines, and the full responsibility for their design, layout, and effectiveness rests on your shoulders – beginning from when you choose the first ingredients to be processed and mixed and until the thoroughly refined substance leaves the production line of your factory in the form of a pill.

Any sufficiently advanced technology…

Refunds? Not on my watch!

It can’t be that hard now, can it? After all, the production cycle requires nothing more from you than choosing an ingredient, buying and placing some machines, and connecting them with conveyor belts. Newsflash: It can be hard and it will be – the procedure becomes remarkably complicated, especially when you have to utilize mixtures of various drugs. The drug effectiveness is determined by its concentration – every ingredient has both positive and negative effects, and you have to find the perfect balance between the two, so that the negative opinions are outshined by the confirmed cases of successful treatment. That’s why the production cycle has to include processes that will regulate the drug’s concentration accordingly, producing a medicine as effective as possible, while being economically viable at the same time.

Unfortunately, to create something more advanced than weak antidepressants or indigestion reliefs you will have to invest a big amount of money in new equipment that is required to produce more specialized, pricier, and, consequently, more profitable drugs. That new equipment, however, has to be unlocked first – a job for the scientists from R&D. The same goes for discovering new ingredients, acquired from insects or rare plants. Furthermore, some of those little creatures of nature can only be found in the wildest of jungles, deserts, and tundra known to mankind, and while it’s true that such excursions require a hefty budget (although I suspect the costs, in no small part, to come from the drinking problem of the explorers you’ve hired), your net income will prove on multiple occasions that sometimes you should pay big to earn even bigger.

Africa becons…

In time, your production lines becomes more and more complicated, as a consequence of equipment additions and numerous, sometimes radical, redesigns they required. This gameplay element is just like a puzzle – we place the equipment pieces, calculate the concentrations and see what conditions are necessary for your drug to have the potential to defeat a specific disease. To create the perfect drug, you can utilize more than a dozen different pieces of equipment that can concentrate, dilute, combine, separate, and mix the effects of ingredients on the production line or analyze them to achieve even better drug effectiveness.

A teeny, tiny, um, mutation…

Unfortunately, as far as life goes, the bacteria and viruses happen to have this funny trait that allows them to mutate in response to changes in the environment. As a result, the pharmaceutical companies have to spend millions of dollars just to avoid being left behind in this arms race. The game is full of random events when a swift reaction can yield substantial profits. In such cases, the patients couldn’t care less about some potential adverse effects, as long as the medicine is working. During your career in pharmacy you will have to create over a hundred different pharmaceuticals in total, some of them costing a vast amount of time and money.

Add a bit of this, a bit of that, a tad of this aaand… Nope, scratch that.

Technology development is the key aspect of Big Pharma. Unfortunately, without sufficient amounts of money the only thing you can develop is neurosis. You have to watch two things: the drug’s ratings and our company’s account balance. To keep both of them at satisfying levels, you have to meet the needs of your clients and find market niches, that will secure maximum income for your company. The game doesn’t allow you to set the price yourself – it is calculated based on the production costs and minimum profit you gain when the drug is released on the market. After that, the price depends mostly on the medicine’s effectiveness – the more confirmed cases of successful treatment, the bigger the customer’s trust, the demand, and the price of the medication, while the costs remain the same. Investing in new technologies, allowing you to optimize the production lines, can yield a big return in the long run.

There’s always competition

The AI-controlled competition is always eager to steal your clients and becomes more and more aggressive with every subsequent scenario. Often – especially when it comes to basic products – the virtual market obeys the first-come, first-served rule, as you will find out after few dozens of seconds. The competing companies are quick to build new production lines and locate unoccupied market niches to sell a good volume of their medications, but when it comes to R&D or ingredient acquisition – not necessarily so. Nevertheless, the competition can be annoying if not outright bad for your business.

Red goes here… Blue goes there…

Details of the gameplay are explained throughout a series of tutorial scenarios that I find a bit lacking, because they lead you by the hand, showing a small pop up window with a list of things to do, to complete the scenario. Furthermore, the tutorials are limited to nothing more than basics, and when you learn later on how to effectively combine ingredients and catalysts or lead legal battles, you do it on your own. It will take you a few hours to learn how to plan and optimize the production of more complex medicines. The sure thing is that you will need to calculate, plan, and find creative ways to approach production line layouts. You can also learn some disease names from it.

The know-how and know-why

After you eventually learn the ropes of Big Pharma, it will have some quality entertainment for you in store. Well, placing equipment and conveyor belts for several hours straight can be a bit much, but when in smaller doses, the game from Twice Circles can be wildly entertaining. The simple interface is very helpful, offering quick access to all the necessary tabs. The visuals, similarly – basic, simplistic even, but very functional, and functionality is what makes or breaks this kind of game. You’ll find out when thinking long and hard how to fit that new piece of equipment in between the existing belts and connect it to the delivery window. The creators have prepared for you a few dozen scenarios with different difficulty level. Or you can try to build the perfect pharmaceutical company in the free mode, where you are the one who sets the scenario conditions.

We have the room, if you have the money…

If you got interested in this game and think you have what it takes to solve any spatial and financial contraption the system can generate, Big Pharma is a game for you. It’s a well-designed strategy, but with a significant saying from logic and calculation. After all, a properly organized factory is necessary to achieve any kind of success in this industry. The game becomes incredibly demanding and complicated, especially in later stages, but drug creation can hook you for many hours. It does have some drawbacks, but if you’re a fan of this type of games, you’ll be satisfied. Given, you’ll get by without something for a headache, because you may get one when you’ll see the possible number of combinations the ingredients can form.