Big Pharma

Genre: Management Sim

Players: 1

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Review:

Big Pharma is a Management Sim with song strong Puzzle game elements worked into its mechanics. Players control a pharmaceutical drug manufacturer and must control the layout of which machines to place in their factory, in turn determining which medical products they send to the market. This game was released on PC in 2015, and ported to multiple platforms in 2019 including the Nintendo Switch, with this release also including the Marketing and Malpractice DLC expansion.

Big Pharma’s visuals use an isometric perspective and seem to be 2D posing as 3D visuals – all of your machines and workers appear to be 3D characters, but you can’t alter the camera angle (only zoom in and out), and the canned animations seem to indicate what you’re looking at is prerendered. In the end, this mostly works, though it can be frustrating not to be able to spin the camera around, especially when a machine obscures what’s behind it. These visuals are paired with a peppy synthesized soundtrack that suits the game reasonably well, but isn’t especially memorable or noteworthy.

Before getting to the gameplay itself, I have to take a moment to talk about the quality of the port, because this version of the game is frankly a mess. No effort seems to have been made here to optimize the game for the Nintendo Switch – there’s no touchscreen support (despite this game seeming perfect for it), the on-screen text is tiny on the TV screen and absolutely unreadable at times in handheld mode, the cluttered menus pop up over one another, obscuring vital information. Some menus automatically cycle through this vital information, making players wait to see what they need while each screen splashes on briefly… and then players must try to process it before it cycles out again.

That’s just the flaws that are here by design, though. The game has a laundry list of flaws that are clearly indicative of a game that needed more playtesting as well. Conveyor belts often do not place properly and need to be removed and replaced. Multiple terms the tutorial uses do not match the terms the rest of the game uses. At multiple points players are instructed to do things that the Nintendo Switch version of the game apparently does not allow. Items in research trees are unable to be properly selected. And a few times my game crashed to a black screen and needed to be reset.

In other words, Big Pharma is a big mess.

And that really frustrates me because this game has some really outstanding, inventive ideas it brings to the Management Sim genre. Every pharmaceutical product players create is something of a puzzle, requiring the stringing together of multiple machines, with players being made to puzzle out how to best use these machines to tease out the positive effects of the drugs they make while minimizing the negative side-effects. One machine might raise the potency of a drug, but also make its side-effect more potent, while another one mixes two drugs together, eliminating half of the effects of each, both good and bad.

These puzzle elements are just one step in a process that involves the usual sort of Management Sim stuff – judging supply and demand, available funds versus expenses, available space versus the space needed to create the drug you’re wanting to. Do you put time and resources into developing the ability to deliver your drugs in cream form, so as to take advantage of their reduction of side-effects? Or do you research new ingredients to gain access to new and potentially more complex drug recipes? Players must weigh these sorts of questions all while competing against AI competitors who are doing the same, and laying claim to portions of the market in doing so.

Unfortunately, while the Puzzle Game-like process adds a fun and unique element to the game, it’s not presented in a clear way, and the terrible tutorial doesn’t properly convey how everything works in a clear manner. Also, given the naturally competitive nature of the market within the game, it seems like a major oversight that there’s no multiplayer mode here.

There is a lot that I really like about Big Pharma. This game really tries some unique and interesting things within the Management Sim genre, and I absolutely applaud it for that. But the lack of polish in this game, the lack of playtesting, and the overall shoddy nature of the port to Nintendo Switch result in a game that’s an absolute mess. I can see the seeds of something truly great within this mess, and there were definitely times that this game had me absolutely engrossed. But just as often I was frustrated, confused, enraged, or exasperated by the game’s many, many, many flaws. If you’re a fan of the genre, you may want to give it a look when it goes on sale, if only to see its unique spin on the genre. However, be warned that this is a broken experience that will disappoint you.

tl;dr – Big Pharma is a Management Sim with some strong Puzzle Game elements that has you managing your own pharmaceutical drug company and its factory layout. The way this game has you puzzling out how to construct the most ideal and profitable drugs is inspired, but this game is an absolute mess of bugs, design flaws, and poor choices in the port to Nintendo Switch that leave it as a broken experience, even though it’s still one that has moments where it’s truly compelling. It’s worth a look for genre fans, but expect a lot of problems and frustrations.

Grade: C

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