Containment

[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.