I was impressed with this game, particularly with the educational content. I'm an engineering school graduate with more of a background in math and physics and only a few required classes in chemistry and biology. Biology never "clicked" with me in the same way that math and physics did, but something about playing this game and being forced to sort of passively strategize from the point of view of the immune system made a lot of the abstract stuff we talked about in my biology class from years ago finally click into place. Any direct experience I've had with biology has largely come from brewing beer and wine, and even that became a little clearer after playing this game.

One thing I really like is that the game mechanics themselves explain the scientific concepts pretty well. Instead of directly controlling the cells, you're sort of giving nature a hand by making sure the right behaviors are stimulated by the right proteins in the environment. You aren't able to drive the cells themselves, you're giving them nudges in the right direction to make sure they're able to find and devour the bacterial invaders as intended. It's a different way of thinking about the problem at hand than a lot of more mechanically-inclined people are used to thinking about. It is a bit like herding cats.

Once you get over the initial helpless feeling of dropping breadcrumbs to entice your cellular heroes to eat a bunch of tasty microscopic enemies, it's incredibly satisfying to watch them ride into battle and gobble up your foes. And it's even a little bit poignant to watch them perish and need to be cleaned up by their comrades before they make the inflammation even worse.

The visuals are beautiful and satisfyingly squishy and actually feel a bit like looking through a microscope. Curious players will find plenty of actual microscope slides upon clicking the data tab and looking at the encyclopedia entries for the various agents depicted in the game. The stylized shapes of the receptors and proteins demonstrate well the ways in which receptors are being activated and affecting cell behavior. And the game helpfully gives several hints for what the player should be trying to do next as new gameplay elements are introduced.

The interface provides a lot of nice visual clues for how the game should be played. Everything is beautifully rendered and the content would be educational even without the interactive element, though the interactive part is what puts it over the top for emphasizing what needs to happen to successfully fight off a bacterial invasion.

Several times I found myself pausing the game to look up articles on Wikipedia and other sources about topics in immunology introduced by gameplay, which is what I suppose a lot of such games are trying to prompt the user to do. So it's definitely a success on that front.

I would rate the gameplay as satisfying but difficult. It's definitely challenging and rather ambitious in scope. Casual gamers will likely find the higher levels rather challenging but not completely impossible. It might be good to have the difficulty level be a bit more adjustable for players on the casual end of things so that a higher rate of inflammation is tolerated before declaring defeat. Or perhaps have a sandbox mode in which a player can experiment and explore gameplay mechanics and track their own statistics without worrying that getting the inflammation too high will end the level altogether. That said, the game as currently presented hits a nice sweet spot of being educational, challenging, and fun. A motivated and thoughtful learner will be able to get a lot out of this game.

A really awesome game which combines both RTS mechanics and science based principles.

If you want to learn whilst challenging yourself by playing a game, this is probably the experience you're looking for. There's a lot of different mechanics here that are very interesting, especially for people who like strategy games and there's also of micro management going on which is entirely justified by scientific findings!

Definitely check this game out, it's a blast!

I will start this review off by stating that the last time I played this game was about a year ago (give or take). I think I played it around the time Covid19 started spreading throughout the world, and everyone was talking about vaccines and all that, and it made me curious - why exactly do we need vaccines? What is a virus, what is the difference between it, a bactera, protozoa and so on, and how does the body go about fighting it?

So I watched a few YouTube videos and searched ENDLESSLY for an immune system game so I could better comprehend how it works, and ended up running into this game. I was immediately hooked! I remember learning how cells actually moved, how white blood cells have a bunch of different receptors around them, which help differentiate self from 'other' and also helps differentiate different types of 'other'. I learned how inflamation plays an important role in the immune system and how it can also be dangerous for your body as a whole, how Neutrophils can only fight for so long before they have to go kamikaze on the enemies, I learned so many things!

So I will be eternally grateful for this game, it sparked my interest in the immune system and I have since watched AS MANY YouTube videos as I could on the subject (whether they were intended for medicine students or not), I even bought a book on it.

So, if you're at all curious how your body fights infections, this is definitely a good place to start - 10/10 would recommend and will play again!

EDIT: Rated 4 on fun because I got stuck on a level and never really got to play with other cells aside from Neutrophils and Macrophages, and it sounded like I should have been able to, I ran into some complications trying to unlock that,but perhaps it's related to the fact I got stuck on a level? Unsure, will leave an update next time I play it.

This is the first game of its kind that actually taught me anything about cells, I had to start googling around to see if it really worked together that way. I got to level 6 so far, really interesting game! My kinda game, just 5 stars everything lol

I would say this game is for middle school students and higher, it uses a lot of acronyms without really telling you how they work and interact. Most of the learning with this game should come from other resources, which is why you have to pretty much do research alongside the game to really know whats going on. It teaches you about cells and how they behave inside your body, everything you interact with gives you a brief description of what they are but its highly recommended to look it up on google outside of the game as well, I would never know anything more about a Neutrophil Cell or Macrophage or whats a TNF(Tumor necrosis factor) is unless I did my own research. If you could trick a high schooler into playing it and getting involved with it, I feel as it they could learn a ton too.

the game is not bad, I saw it for the first time https://www.youtube.com/ on and became interested

I really enjoyed how I can attack other cells. I enjoyed how you can buy other cells and upgrade them. I also enjoyed how the white cells work together with the other white cells as teamwork. I wouldn't change anything about this game, because I like the game the way it is, and it is very helpful ,and educational when it comes to biology, physics, and all sciences. I would tell my fellow peers, and classmates, and my teachers that you should definitely play this game, because it is not just for fun it helps you learn, and work through strategies, and I recommend that teachers should use this website for special games like immune defense when it comes to science. I believe that immune defense is one of the best strategy games I ever played. It's a well done made game.