Viral fever: Frontier Worlds is Plague Inc with more than one bug

Go west, young nanomonstrosity.

Given the enormous and enduring popularity of James Vaughan’s Plague Inc, it won’t surprise you to learn that I get a lot of pitches for clones of his cataclysmic infectious disease simulator. Plague Inc is a horrifying zen rock garden of a game — most of the time you’re just watching it happen, waiting for another million people or two to succumb to your virus and fill your DNA point coffers so you can afford to enhance your bug with a new symptom.

Frontier Worlds: Origins is the first game I’ve seen yet that makes any meaningful enhancements to the Plague Inc formula, and it does it by adding more infections that you’re trying to out-compete with yours.

Frontier Worlds is set in the far future where corporations are jostling to be the first to colonise newly-discovered exo-planets. This is a gung-ho capitalist future, so that colonising isn’t being done with unreliable robots or expensive humans; the pioneers of tomorrow are hardy, adaptable microorganisms.

Your bug starts on the world map with microbes from several other companies. As in Plague, you get periodic subsidies of DNA points that you can use to adapt your nano-settlers: make them photosynthetic on sunny planets, or more ferocious in direct competition with other bugs. Once a game really gets going it starts to look like Conway’s Game of Life, but in this case you have the ability to stick your finger in the petri dish and nudge the results.

I doubt Frontier Worlds is going to dethrone Plague Inc: the UI lacks feedback on what immediate effects your choices have, and the human-free sci-fi setting saps the game of emotional impact. But turning a planet into a petri dish full of weaponised bugs is a damned clever idea.

Frontier Worlds is two bucks on the App Store — there’s also a free version that lets you play on one planet and unlock the rest with a single IAP. Watch the trailer below.