When you think of big pharmaceutical companies, you often wonder what goes on behind the scenes. Undead Inc. takes that idea and runs with it, allowing you to run a pharmaceutical franchise on your own. Unfortunately, the legal ways of making money aren’t going to help pay those franchise fees and you must resort to criminal measures. But as your operations go below-ground, you start picking up unwanted attention that threatens to collapse your business.
Undead Inc. by Rightsized Games is a management simulator that forces you to dabble in the underground science trade to let you be a franchise owner. With increasing costs and shortened deadlines threatening to ruin your hard work, you must suppress your ethics and think about your company. You can also engage in mad science because it’s profitable and you just want the world to suffer from a zombie outbreak.
The idea of Undead Inc. is simple; start a pharmaceutical business and earn money to pay your franchise fees. However, the execution is significantly more challenging. You only have a few days to pay those fees and keep your business growing. Every time you pay the fee, the amount increases and your payment time decreases. This forces you to resort to increasingly illegal measures because you can’t possibly win legally.
Undead Inc. isn’t an easy game to master, and the tutorial gives you a good foundation. However, for better or for worse, this is a game you must learn and repeatedly fail at. You must run into problems, learn how to deal with them, and start dipping your toe into black market sales. The pressure to rush into illegal sales is both exhilarating and also punishing. It’s your only way to keep your business afloat. The exciting part comes from tailoring your business and adding new depths to the typical management simulator genre. You are forced to expand underground, using every available resource to create goods for sale on the black market. This must be done in parallel with your legal ventures as you are a pharmaceutical franchise. Your employees also signed on for above-board activities and they may not look kindly upon your illegal ventures.
There are several aspects to manage that aren’t immediately obvious, like employee loyalty and harvesting biomass. Creating more production facilities and going underground are essential, as is timing your evacuation properly. You can also choose challenging scenarios or your own career mode. Every experience helps you grow if you can at least pay the first franchise fee and evacuate successfully.
Building something illegal is inherently thrilling and knowing that you benefit from it is icing on the cake. You make more money selling illegal goods on the black market and it becomes the only way to stay afloat. Weapons, plants, infantry, and animal cyborgs are definitely not legal but seeing their development is fascinating. The experience makes you feel like you are at the forefront of the science industry. Managing multiple employees and manufacturing products does make you feel like a business owner. It’s also compounded by throwing off suspicion and running operations to avoid interference. You search for traitors among your employees or bribe police officers to look elsewhere. Your franchise is run in a local neighborhood, making you consider the distance your employees must travel. Rest and sleep are important for your employees or they will get suspicious. Adding these strategic depths challenges you because your success comes from managing different factors. Overwhelming as they may be at first, you eventually learn how to control your growing science empire.
On the other hand, it does feel like taking the legal route is inherently silly. You can pay your first franchise fee only using legal methods, but there’s no way to expand. It’s as if the game forces you to dive into the black market because there’s no other way to play. Even the legal methods of making money are limited compared to the depth of illegal experiments. While you are missing out if you don’t pursue new technologies, it does feel unfortunate that there’s no other way to succeed.
There are also some bugs within the game itself. Some are beneficial like your security guards not dying in firefights and absorbing damage. Others are far worse, like police getting stuck during raids and constantly arresting employees. Even if you can use bugs or glitches to your advantage, saving isn’t always able to help. There’s only one autosave to record your progress, making it possible to lose everything.
Having only one autosave forces you to commit to your decisions, but it’s also tough while you are learning. Maybe you don’t know how to evacuate properly or want to reference the tutorial. Perhaps you aren’t sure if you can deal with a zombie outbreak you caused yourself. Sometimes you take out a loan and don’t realize what the repayment date looks like. It’s easy to make mistakes while you are learning, and sometimes a crash forces you to start from a less optimal point. What the autosave is meant to do is force you to commit to your decisions in the event you get a police raid. Being able to take back your decisions would be too easy and reduce the game’s challenge. At the same time, Undead Inc. isn’t a simple game to learn, and some checkpoints wouldn’t hurt. You must commit to your decisions for better or for worse, but the pain of a failed franchise helps you grow.
Undead Inc. does a great job of forcing you to innovate with illegal enterprises to stay in business. The strategic depths force you to consider many factors, coupled with an autosave to make every decision count. Learning the ins and outs is tricky even with a tutorial and it is trial-by-fire in some aspects. There are also several bugs and crashes to work out that derail progress. But if you give Undead Inc. a chance, it can scratch the itch of those looking for a challenging management simulator.
Victor played Undead Inc. on PC with a review code.
