When Pandemic Legacy: Season 1 was launched in 2015, it was met with a rave response from gamers. A campaign-based tackle the unique Pandemic, it dropped followers into the acquainted position of medics battling to eradicate lethal viral strains earlier than they unfold across the globe and destroy humanity.
The recreation’s greatest draw was a storyline which unfolded over a number of play periods, with ailments mutating and cities falling into chaos as a sinister conspiracy unfold its tendrils internationally. Along the way in which, gamers put stickers on the board, destroyed playing cards, and opened sealed compartments to disclose hidden elements, completely altering the sport in response to their very own actions. A sequel, Pandemic Legacy: Season 2, took the motion a long time into the longer term, exploring a world wracked by the occasions of the primary recreation. Now, there’s a 3rd and remaining installment, taking gamers again to the harmful days of 1962 and the peak of simmering tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union.
Pandemic Legacy: Season 0 revolves round CIA brokers tasked with uncovering plans for a robust new bio-weapon being developed by rogue components of the Soviet intelligence companies. Where the established Pandemic formulation noticed gamers zipping from metropolis to metropolis to do away with plastic cubes representing ailments, right here you and your companions intention to clear the board of miniature plastic spies. Let them unfold too freely, and so they’ll overthrow the capitalist system. More importantly, they may hand you an embarrassing loss.
It’s principally a superficial change, nevertheless it’s removed from the one method that Season 0 evokes its Cold War environment. Different areas on its board include totally different alignments: Allied, Soviet, and impartial. As enemy brokers, you gained’t be capable of fly freely into Soviet territory, and getting round these restrictions requires establishing groups of native brokers, represented by plastic miniatures that appear to be VW vans. You’ll be capable of dispatch them to do your soiled work, assassinating Soviet spooks with ruthless effectivity.
Your aims for every playthrough additionally really feel suitably CIA-esque. You’ll want to seek out the areas of enemy property and infiltrate secret Soviet amenities. Best of all, although, are the high-stakes manhunt missions which see a goal resembling a defector or double agent begin in a single metropolis and frantically make their method in the direction of Soviet strongholds when you attempt to reduce off all of their doable escape routes. It makes for an exhilarating chase with some genuinely gut-wrenching moments the place your quarry slips by your fingers simply as you shut in to seize them.
What actually makes the sport shine, although, is what occurs between missions. As with earlier video games within the collection, you’ll run by a deck of playing cards introducing dramatic new plot components. You’ll add stickers to the board representing ever-tightening Soviet surveillance, ensuring cities extra harmful to go to. But what’s most attention-grabbing is the power to improve your characters over time. Each comes with a passport booklet with pages for 3 totally different identities, all with their very own talents. Over time you’ll add new powers, letting you fine-tune every agent for duties like searching down enemies, sharing info with teammates, or recruiting native operatives.
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Choose your secret identification.
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The elements.
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The full board.
You’ll be capable of swap between identities as you play to adapt to the altering state of affairs on the board, and in an impressed contact the sport helps you to customise your characters’ look utilizing layers of stickers. It has no impact on gameplay, however the thought of slapping on a wig and a false mustache to sneak behind the Iron Curtain is undeniably enjoyable.
As you delve deeper into the marketing campaign, the sport ramps up its problem, and whereas it’s inconceivable to enter element with out giving freely some vital surprises, you possibly can anticipate to take care of ever-intensifying Soviet schemes and pencil-pushing superiors who appear intent on getting in your method. What begins as a reasonably extra sophisticated model of Pandemic morphs into one thing far meatier and extra demanding.
The incremental means of change means you by no means really feel overwhelmed. There are some events, although, the place it turns into clear halfway by a session that you simply aren’t going to win, and it’s right here that Season 0 feels flat, with gamers aimlessly wandering across the board chasing unobtainable aims. It looks like going into the second half of a soccer match together with your workforce dropping 8-0, though in our marketing campaign it solely occurred as soon as.
Even once you lose, you’ll progress by the plot. This may imply lacking out on some very important intelligence, nonetheless, and acquiring and decoding info could be simply as vital as what truly happens on the board. There are smuggled paperwork, secret plans, eyewitness testimonies, and different clues which you’ll intention to piece collectively to kind an entire image of what your adversaries are as much as.
What is likely to be most spectacular, although, is the way in which the sport digs into the inside battle of its protagonists. There are a number of factors all through the marketing campaign the place gamers’ opinions on totally different points have a direct, mechanical impact on the sport. And whereas the plot runs largely on rails, there are a handful of key choices which result in a choice of totally different endings.
If there’s one narrative shortfall, it’s that Season 0 by no means actually addresses the deeper query of whether or not the ends of all this shady spycraft justify the means. It’s not that the sport presents a simplistic good-vs-evil view of the Cold War; its depiction of the CIA is much from heroic, and there are some horrible individuals on each side. But the thought of vans prowling Latin America to bump off leftists is distinctly uncomfortable given the real-world historical past of CIA involvement within the area, even when you handle to imagine that the individuals you’re wiping off the map are in truth secret brokers within the pay of Moscow.
Spy fiction of all varieties exists on a spectrum. On one facet is escapist fantasy like James Bond, on the opposite are deeper tales exploring a world of distrust and duplicity, and what occurs after we enable individuals to step outdoors of legality and accepted norms. Season 0 falls principally into the previous class, and I’d have favored to have seen how its mix of narrative and mechanical wizardry dealt with some deeper, extra reflective points.
Is this sufficient to negate all the things that Pandemic Legacy: Season 0 does properly? No. The recreation is a becoming fruits to a collection which has given gamers a succession of powerful choices, hard-won victories, and agonizingly shut defeats. For newcomers, Season 1 is a greater place to start out when it comes to complexity and storyline. But when you’ve been alongside for the journey from the beginning, that is one hell of a send-off.
