Appetizing Apps!: How To Beat Plague Inc. | Variety

Spoilers contained below

Plague Inc. makes wiping out the human race a game.

For $0.99 you can destroy the world in the form of a disease with Plague, a strategy game available for iPhone and Android.

The brainchild of Ndemic Creations, a one man developer from England, was nominated for an IGN award for “Best Overall Strategy Game” in 2012, the very same year it was released.

It did not win the IGN award, but the creator, James Vaughan, was recently invited to give a presentation at the Centers for Disease Control.

The premise of the game is simple. You are a disease and your job is to extinct humanity — all 6.8 billion people in the world — before the scientists can find a cure.

You start off as bacteria and if you have successfully destroyed humanity on the normal setting, you unlock the next and so on. For a price, you can unlock all seven different plagues, plus the two special viruses called Neurax Worm and Necroa Virus, but where is the fun in that?

There is a portion before you start your game that will allow you to modify your disease genes. I am sure this is what helped me beat the game in five days.

That is the only investment that I suggest you could make if you don’t want your professor calling you out in the middle of a lecture.

Yes, the game is that addictive.

There are numerous strategies on the web to help you beat the game, but some of the plagues operate differently. Here are some suggestions for beating the first plague on the hardest level:

Start in a highly populated, well-traveled country such as Saudi Arabia or China.

If nothing else, under transmissions, evolve water and air completely. Also, to sort of hack your disease into increasing infectivity without getting noticed right away, under symptoms, evolve coughing and leave it at that.

Sometimes it is hard to reach isolated islands such as Greenland and Iceland, especially Greenland. What you want to do is not only make sure your infectivity is where it should be, but also, under the abilities section, evolve the Cold Resistance 1 and if you have some DNA points to spare, go back to Transmissions and evolve Bird 1.

Symptoms mutate in this game against your choosing. Devolve any risky symptoms (beyond the first) until it starts costing you DNA points. If you have done all of the above, your disease should be spreading swiftly.

The key to winning this game is too wipe everyone out before the cure is complete, so you want to infect as many people as you can without being noticed at all. Keep your symptoms and infectivity up, and invest in your abilities without squandering away your DNA points.

When you get the note that there are no healthy people left, then unleash the kraken — translation: evolve your harmless symptoms into more fatal ones, like Total Organ Failure.