Posted on: January 3, 2016
Daassie
Verified ownerGames: 37 Reviews: 10
Okay, but lacks in purpose and direction
With a name like Big Pharma, I thought the game would be a funny take on the exploitation practiced by pharmaceutical companies. It also had a whiff of Theme Hospital about it, which I thought would manifest as strange machinery and hilarious concepts. What I got instead was a very simple puzzle game with no purpose to it. The game mechanics are nicely polished, but the game itself seriously lacks any incentive or narrative for the player to follow. Humour didn't show up for work either. The fun part is designing the production lines and optimising them, but there are only a few pieces for doing so, and everything happens on a 2D plane - all you do is buy more floor space and develop percentage-based upgrades for existing machinery. I could have bought The Incredible Machine for the same purpose... The rest of the game is a tacked on wall of text. The premise is wasted, as there seems to be no real depth to the business simulation side of things and there is no humour to spur things along. As cool as the Exploration and Research ideas are, both tech trees are very shallow and yield very little in the way of actual cool stuff (+% and new ingredients, woohoo...). As a simple puzzle game, Big Pharma does okay: there's a fair bit of complexity to be achieved with different ingredient combinations and it's an okay simplification of manufacturing processes. But for €23 you can expect more than this. Game is worth €5-10 depending on how generous you're feeling. Or just play a Flash pipeline puzzle game for free.
Is this helpful to you?
