Undead Inc. Review - Don't Skim Over The Policies

If you believe everything Endswell Medical says, you deserve to lose that vast wealth you’ve invested in their franchise. Welcome to Undead Inc. – a medical sim where you conduct medical research, where ‘arms’ aren’t just limbs that need treatment.

A strategy game from Rightsized Games and Team17, you’re the director of a business that is at the mercy of its board members. Take on the ‘good name’ of Endswell Medical and see that its stakeholders receive a hefty paycheck by any means necessary, even if that means dodging the law.

Looking through the Undead Inc. policy manual, Endswell Medical encourages staff to adopt a need-to-know basis and consider the business practices if they ‘appear less than perfectly legal’. If that’s in the manual, you might have considered other franchises. McDonald’s? No matter. You’re here now, so focus, or you’ll be on a disciplinary. Or jail.

Undead Inc. Review – Medical Bills

Undead Inc. has two paths: a Career Mode and a Scenario Mode. The latter is more about set pieces and objectives. For the review, I’ll focus on the Career route—if I knew what I was supposed to be doing! This game has minimal guidance from the moment you select your character, leaving you with ample office space and money, burning a hole in your lab coat pocket.

With Endswell Medical having quite the reputation, it’s scandalous that you haven’t been given any help in setting up. There’s no support with recruitment, no further info on suspicion levels or hazards, and worse, there are no tooltips when hovering over icons! Since Undead Inc. was released, it’s accumulated a lot of negative feedback on Steam. Some of the comments make sense. 

The concept is excellent, and there’s a lot of potential, but it seems to be in the Early Access stage. Presentation-wise, it looks the part. The in-game visuals and UI are nice, and it’s easy to navigate. When I say ‘navigate’, I mean move the cursor. As for what you’re clicking, I couldn’t tell you as it’s very much trial by error.

Carry On Doctor

Hiring new staff is straightforward enough. You look at their skillset, their price, back to the skillset, and then compromise. A business is as good as its staff, so I hired the best available, which proved my first failure: no more money. Well, it wasn’t just that – I’d spunked all my money on rooms and research.

The Undead Inc. career mode doesn’t drip feed features as you can build willy-nilly (again, my first failure). As there aren’t any solid ‘show you the ropes’ scenarios, I hired one type of staff, not realising the multiple tabs. What happened was disgruntled customers, stagnant research, and a haemorrhaging of money. 

Let’s look at this objectively without using my business model. Undead Inc. allows you to go legit and research medicine to benefit the people. Morally, it’s sound, but as a franchisee, you’re unlikely to stay in the green zone. Alternatively, there’s the high-risk, high-reward model where you invest in arms and swim in the money, though the po-po will be watching you.

The Straight And Narrow

Comparing it to another simulator, Weedcraft Inc., there are legitimate paths to follow, but we all know that the dangerous path is the fun one. How do you cope with all eyes on you? Bribes, or as the corporates would define it, policies. It just goes to prove that money does make the money go around, regardless of good intent.

Conceptually, this game is decent and could quickly help you dodge the sun, avoid your chores, and accelerate unkempt pubic hair. You could theoretically play this for hours and hours. However, as correctly identified from user comments, there’s no hand-holding here, and the ‘how to play’ element is quite disastrous.

I’m an anomaly in gaming as I don’t care much about bugs, framerates, and minor technical flaws. I’m patient enough to tolerate them as long as they don’t damage gameplay. Undead Inc. doesn’t have unforgivable bugs, but it needs more attention to cater to new players—a.k.a. all players who want to get used to the game without investing hours and hours in trial and error exercises.

Undead Inc. Review Summary

There’s plenty of potential, and I certainly wouldn’t write it off. It’ll remain in my library, and I will periodically check in should these areas get addressed and apply a suitable rating. Not that the latter matters, but at the moment, it’d be unfair to do so.