Pandemic: The Board Game Xbox One Review

"Hard to Survive"

Campaign

August 12, 2019 at 3:25am
By Jason Stettner

This is a digital transition of the well known board game, Pandemic. It’s been brought over to the console and largely contains the same strategic aspects of play. This is incredibly hard to get into however, the tutorial really isn’t one.

It’s this long series of segmented goals, that are basically challenges for you to work through. They take forever to go through, and don’t teach you anything about the actual game or how to play it. This was annoying, and made the game almost impossible to get into. Once I understood things by going to regular gameplay, it was easy to get a hold of. I would suggest skipping the tutorial entirely here.

The actual game itself is also rather simplistic. There is some depth in how you can play it in terms of setting up the games, but it’s still barebones. There are options to play this locally alone, or with up to five players. There’s no online play though, which is certainly disappointing as this is best enjoyed with others quite honestly.

Gameplay

This title is presented with just a world map, there are many cities stacked across it. These cities have infections placed upon them each turn based on card draws. You also get some cards, and other event type specialty cards to help deal with these outbreaks. You’ll move from spot to spot cleaning things up, and eventually working towards a cure. It makes more sense once you get rolling as it’s actually rather hard to explain.

Basically a turn based setup. The presentation is rather clean, and not too difficult to control. I did find it was hard to select cities cursor wise, or to get an idea of how to swap things between the various character classes that you have selected. There are multiple difficulty options, and many unique ways to change-up each scenario you play.

The Conclusion

This console version of the digital Pandemic conversion leaves a lot to be desired, with a very inaccessible setup. It’ll take awhile to understand, and you’ll realize that it really isn’t very complex at all. It can be rather repetitive, and in turn a bit boring after awhile.

There are some dynamics in the ways you can edit the scenarios, but this is minimal in altering the overall experience. It would have been nice to get a multiplayer addition to this title. It just generally feels really light on content, and incredibly hard to get into. They shouldn’t have put a “tutorial” in this at all since it certainly isn’t what I’d consider to be one.

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Pandemic: The Board Game Review on Xbox One X

Rating Overall: 5.2