Reviews

• gamedeal user

  Oct 13, 2015

  Came within 5% of the top-most goal for a level, and failed for lack of time. Went back several saves and looked at everything. Was my choice of drug wrong? Were my production lines a square or two inefficient, preventing me from utilizing another delivery portal? Was I spending too much on Bolivian Tree Frog Saliva? Did I not get the researchers working on new machines fast enough? And then it hit me: my best-selling drug, for erectile dysfunction, beautifully crafted to avoid side effects and have an A cure rating... was devastating the market... for itself. I simply couldn't pull enough profit out of the economy if I cured people. Tried again. Made sure to give the sufferers a side-effect free drug which worked... some of the time... enough to get their hopes up... but not enough to stop buying next month's installment. 10/10 would abandon business ethics again.
• gamedeal user

  Aug 30, 2015

  This game was a little bit of a surprise.. I don't usually get much into tycoon type games, though I have fond memories of Theme Hospital from a few years back, and I guess Rollercoaster Tycoon, so my experience isn't great to compare this to others in the genre. That being said, I find this game a great deal of fun. There are two core elements to the game; a Logistical puzzle, and, a decent strategic/business simulator. I'll cover these separately. The first part is what you mostly see in the pretty screenshots - you need to construct assembly lines that transform raw biological substances (insect parts, plants, etc) into finished pharmaceuticals. There are a good number of different medicines you can manufacture and each one has vastly different requirements. You need to purchase a variety of machines to transform the product as it moves along the belt from the 'in window' to the exit. Some machines strengthen effects and some dilute them. Other machines are used to combine two ingredients, to analyze a finished drug, to modify or rearrange effects, and to package the final product. All of these machines have different 'in' and 'out' slots that will need to be matched up via conveyor belts in the correct order. At first this can be a little daunting and frustrating, especially when you attempt to 'upgrade' a drug to a more powerful version, and some trial and error is required. That said, it's great fun once you learn the basics, and quite rewarding when you smooth everything out. The second part of the game is the business sim. This is probably standard fare for these types of games, but again I'm not experienced enough to provide a good comparison. In order to succeed you'll need to carefully manage your expenses - buildings and expansions, machines, drug ingredients, research, and exploration all require money, and while you can take out loans, this will quickly sink you if you don't have steady cashflow coming in. There are competitors who are trying to make a profit as well, and deciding which drugs will provide the best returns can be a challenge. You must invest time and money into research in order to unlock better machines and make your existing ones more efficient. You also must send explorers out to discover new substances that can be transformed or combined into new types of drugs. Random events can have impact on supply and demand as well, so it pays to keep an eye on news popups. There is a good tutorial, which introduces you to game concepts as you play so you don't get overwhelmed. After that, a series of 'missions' of advancing difficulties keeps the game fresh. I can't speak to the replayability of the game as I'm nowhere near completing the core missions yet, but I believe there Is a sandbox mode once you've mastered all the basics. The missions themselves can take from 15 minutes to a couple hours, depending on the difficulty and how focused you are. Big Pharma's art style can be described as cartoony and colorful. It really reminded me of a less silly version of theme hospital, but aside from the graphics (and upbeat music) there aren't may other similarities between these two games. One nice feature is the ability to 'paint' your factory - with various primary hues and patterns. This could be useful to customize different product lines or processes on each line, or just pretty things up to your own tastes. I recommend this to anyone who enjoys casual business sims and puzzles. Big Pharma succeeds well at both, and I found it well worth the price of 24.99, though I was fortunate enough to get it on sale.
• gamedeal user

  Nov 8, 2015

  I am a big fan of logistic-puzzle games and thought that this might take the gameplay of Spacechem or Factorio in exciting new directions. Unfortunately, the logistics puzzles and business simulation don't really play off of each other well, and the game quickly becomes tedious. The two halves of the game don't play well together. The logistics lines are a little bland and mostly come down to twiddling the concentration of a drug up, then down, then up again to evolve its attributes and get them to the right concentration. This might be more fun if you could go whole-hog laying out a complicated production line, but the business side of things ensure that's generally unprofitable. Everything operates at just a 1:1 or 1:2 ratio, so there's no thrill of big, powerful throughput like you get with a massive Factorio setup or a speedy Spacechem reaction. The business level isn't that interesting, either. Your profit is dependent on the efficiency and margin of your manufacturing lines. Sometimes competitors will interfere by saturating your drug's market, which reduces your profits. Often, a competitor will beeline patent technology just to force you to replace your best drug every other year. That's just annoying. The business layer is also your chief source of waiting, as you twiddle your thumbs waiting for the next ingredient or technology to unlock. The GUI is also a bit of a chore. You'll frequently be flipping back and forth between the "Ingredients" and "Cures" tabs to try to figure out what steps you need to evolve your drugs, which ingredients provide the desired attributes, and finally what concentration you'll sell it at, and whether competitors are saturating the market. There are some clever things. Sometimes you will sell a drug with a bad side-effect profile just because it's not profitable to sell a more refined form of the drug. Or maybe your drug will be too effective and demand will go down, or maybe your one drug's side effects will drive sales for another drug. These are all twiddly little fringe cases, and they're not cause enough to keep me playing.
• gamedeal user

  Sep 5, 2016

  If you are the type who keeps working at something until you get it perfect, try this game! If you like games such as the Build-A-Lot, Farm Frenzy and Tycoon simulators, this is for you. It's a bit tricky to wrap your head around to start with, the tutorials teach you the bare basics (there's alot to figure out yourself as you go) and I almost gave up - but it is a puzzle game for a reason! Now I have a handle on the game mechanics, it's so addictive I can't go a day without playing. By far the trickiest part of the game after learning how to make successful drugs, is how to handle loans and income streams. You can't really do much without taking out loans (or at least this is how my gameplay works). I've tried looking for a similar game but haven't been able to find one. I'm hoping they release a similar game before I tire of this one! Getting master on all levels is very difficult, so it should be a while :) Just downloaded the DLC and looking forward to many many more hours of enjoyment. 10/10
• gamedeal user

  Nov 1, 2015

  Playing Big Pharma and figuring out its intricacies is a lot of fun... at first. The stages and challenges are pretty samey, and the game gets pretty old really fast. If the game cost five bucks, I might have given it a thumbs up recommendation; at its current list price, it's twenty bucks too dear. Big Pharma provides dozens of hours of gameplay... but you'll only really have fun for the first few. If you keep playing past that it'll probably be out of some completionist urge, you'll play well past the point you stopped having fun with it and you'll just end up resenting the game. Once you've figured out how the game works and you find yourself just fulfilling mission objectives, this should signal that the honeymoon period is over and you should put this game down and do something fun instead. If price is no object and you're really drawn in by this game's premise (I was), consider buying this for a couple hours' worth of fun. Otherwise, this is a title you can safely skip.
• gamedeal user

  Sep 2, 2015

  Big Pharma is a ...Well, lets just say it outright, it's not a game about being a large scale megacorporation producing a massive amount of drugs and cornering the market. It's not a simulation of medical pills and pharma companies, and it certainly is not a game about the overall management of such a company or the simulation of such a thing. It makes promises that it can not keep. You will get little strategy, severely abstracted simulation, and very limited management. 'Big Pharma' is not about anything big at all. Instead, it is a small scale game that is essentially a puzzle about optimising chains of machines to produce a desired output, in a randomised building area of random size, with random ingredients that have random effects. If you like that, then good for you. You will probably enjoy this one, but for the rest of us who are after the other 'features' it proclaims to have.. The simulation is basic to the point where I wonder if it is a simulation at all. Diseases have a set number of sufferers or a set cycle/increase of sufferers and your management is limited purely to the supply lines, machines, and conveyor belts. Everything else is abstracted to the degree that I wonder why it was even included in the game, and many times adds nothing except a timer you need to wait on before you can continue working your belts. The challenge, and main gameplay is more alike a puzzle. Fit machines in the (random) building you have to have your (random) ingredients produce an optimal effect for maximum profit. Nearly all the gameplay is about optimising your conveyor belts and machines, which will be frustrating to you because the machines come only in one form with 4 facings. You can not make a symmetrical and effective supply line, and conveyors can not go over or under eachother. You get a limited amount of (Randomly placed) input/output areas to connect to, and often you will not have space for just about anything more than a basic machine. Employees never have to walk in, out, or do anything in your building, they are merely an animation that is part of the machine. Research and exploration happens somewhere else. You never see your scientists or explorers except in a menu where you send them out. If this game was only purely the production tab, was honest about its size and content and somewhere between 5-10 dollars, then it would be great. But as it currently stands I just can not reccommend it for its price. The conveyor belt optimising puzzling is nice, and I will likely play it a few more times just for that, but that is all there is to the game. There is no 'improving the lives of millions', there is no 'getting rid of disease', there is no real management or simulation of a 'pharmaceutical conglomerate' here. The challenge scenarios are jokes, the rival corporations are jokes, and the whole 'business sim' part that it talks about in the "About This Game" part of the store are jokes. This is a conveyor belts puzzle with shiny graphics, get it for that if it is ever at a 75% or even 50% sale, but as long as it stays above 10 euro/dollar, I recommend avoiding it.
• gamedeal user

  Sep 23, 2016

  280 Hours on the game... half which I was probably afk... Where to Start... It's a decent game. The graphics are clean. The user interface is pretty straight forward. It's entertaining. It has a good tutorial. There are a few metrics of the game that are a bit tricky, but once you figure it all out, you can start pumping out money making products in no time. The only real issue i have with the game is it's a bit repetitive after a while. The only real reason I’m still playing it, mainly to finish off the last achievement I need for a perfect game. The grind is always the start of the level. All the challenges with the exception of the full unlock mission, have everything locked up tight. It's a bit annoying to have to go thru the same unlock everything BS each time you start a new level. Other games would let you unlock it, and then allow you to keep it on future missions, not this game. The other real issue with this game is the luck generation. A level is never hard or easy based on your skill or the conditions of the level.... The level is hard or easy based on the ingredients it gives you. If you get great ingredients, you can have a great start and plow through the level pretty easily. If you get shit ingredients, it’s just a long drag and struggle and you're better off starting over and hoping for a better starting hand. The game's full price is about $30 CDN. I'm notoriously cheap when it comes to buying games, not because I don’t appreciate the cost of development, but because I have about 500 games on my steam account I haven’t touched yet. It makes it harder to buy a new game over playing something I already bought and paid for. The moment I saw Big Pharma, i knew i wanted to buy it, but not at full pop. However, it is currently on sale for $10 CDN. Is it worth that, I would say yes. I figured i got a solid 100 hours of entertainment from this game, so at $0.10 / hour, this game is a great steal at $10. Even if you tried it and found yourself bored after about 20 hours, it's hard to be entertained in this world for $0.50 / hour. Do I recommend it?? I recommend buying this game when it's on sale. I'd give it a solid 7/10
• gamedeal user

  Jun 16, 2020

  All the parts of this game work OK. I enjoyed learning how to play, and how to use the machines to make drugs. The designers came up with a lot of clever/creative mechanisms for manipulating and combining drugs/effects. But once you basically understand how to play and how to use the machines to get the effects you want, often this whole part of the game (placing machines/belts in your factory) just feels like a chore. And if you're trying to maximize profits, you end up doing a ton of this - tearing down lines, building the same simple lines repeatedly, and copying more complex lines from one place to another. Occasionally this requires a bit of thinking to fit the line into a different shaped factory room - but often it's just repetitive tedium. I did a couple tutorials, then a beginner scenario, then jumped into the advanced ones. In my second advanced run, I was pretty close to making the "master" goal, but realized that to reach the goal I was going to have to tear down a couple long lines and refactor them to increase production. There was enough space that I was sure I could do it... and I just didn't want to. I just didn't want to click all those buttons (and I'm a person who likes Factorio). The "placing machines" part of the game is the interesting part.. but it gets old fast once you've learned the mechanics. The overarching game - deciding what to research and which drugs to make - doesn't really have enough going on to be interesting on its own, and you end up making bad decisions in that game just because you're bored of tinkering around with the other part. Like, after a while you just ignore the world events, or whether your competitors are horning in on your cough syrup racket or whatever, because you just can't be bothered to pick up that line and try to find something else to go there. The 4% increase in profit is just not worth 200 more clicks. Anyway, if this is on sale, it's maybe worth getting it for the initial joy of discovery. But it doesn't hold up well enough to justify full price.
• gamedeal user

  Aug 29, 2015

  A profoundly pleasurable game where ingredients travel through a series of cunningly placed machines and belts towards their inevitable destiny as medications with (hopefully) as few side effects as possible. You know, since side effects lose money. Not because you care. Sociopath.
• gamedeal user

  Aug 31, 2015

  I want to recommend this game, I really do. But it's sadly just not worth $20. It needs more content! Upgrades, ingredients, different corporation aspects, etc. It just needs a lot more than what is currently in game. Amazing concept, decent game as of now, but with some more meat on it's bones this game could be great!