Killer Flu! Review

http://www.clinical-virology.org/killerflu/killerflu.html
Ah! The flu! No work, no play, nothing except sitting around feeling horrible. Alright, the flu isn't really here, but UK Clinical Virology Network's Killer Flu is. The goal of this game is not to show that the flu is bad, everyone knows that, but to reveal that a “pandemic flu is rare and an unusual strain that is harder to spread.” The method the Network used to get their agenda across is the actual strategy of the game. In the game the player is a flu virus that must infect as many people as it can. It was a great idea of the developer to make the player the thing that is doing the harm, rather than the thing that is being harmed.

As a game Killer Flu is somewhat successful. There is strategy involved in that the player must make someone sick by infecting them with a strain of flu they are not immune to. Then the player must get the infected person to the correct building. All of this must be done in a certain time period while making sure people don't get better before reaching the percentile of population you must infect to win. One problem with the game is that it was really easy to infect people with the regular influenza virus. This does help get the message across that its easier for the regular flu to spread then a pandemic flu, but it made the game somewhat boring. To fix this the creator might want to make the strains of viruses that can infect the person harder to spin in the influenza spinner. Also, the graphics were also somewhat boring. It was hard to tell some of the buildings apart and everything looked similar.

Killer Flu was pretty successful in promoting their agenda. Although there was a large amount of information at the beginning of game in small text I really wanted to read it. It could have been because I hate the flu with a passion and wanted to know more about it, but either way I read through that whole page. I had no idea that a pandemic flu isn't as deadly as it seems. The game tried to give out more information during the game at certain points, but I just wanted to play the game and so usually passed them by. The general idea was put across, though, through the game play. It was in fact very easy to infect people with the ordinary flu because the player can infect anyone on the street and does not have to wait for people to come in contact. It was much harder to keep the bird flu infecting the population. The bird flu only starts out with one person and the player must move that person in order to infect others. However, once that person is moved trying to get everyone infected before they become healthy again is very hard.