Gamers review bomb a Plague Inc. knockoff after China bans original

Chinese reviewers accuse the Russian game of being another Chinese copycat

Reading Time:2 minutes

Unlike Plague Inc., in which players try to spread a virus, Virus Antidote asks players to develop a cure as a virus spreads. (Picture: Action Portal)

Published: 10:18pm, 5 Mar 2020Updated: 11:18pm, 5 Mar 2020

This article originally appeared on ABACUS

For the past week, gamers searching for Plague Inc. on the iOS App Store in China have been seeing a different game instead.

Sure, the app icon looks almost exactly the same, and the screenshot shows a world map. That’s just like Plague Inc., a game about creating a powerful virus that shot to the top of the charts amid the coronavirus outbreak – before suddenly disappearing from the App Store in China last week.

But Virus Antidote: Pandemic Doom is a very different game, and players aren’t happy about it.

It’s being met with a slew of negative reviews, pushing the rating down to 1.2 on China’s iOS App Store. Reviewers are slamming it for being a subpar game and seemingly another cash grab from a Chinese copycat developer.

(Whether it’s subpar or not is debatable, but one thing isn’t: the game is not Chinese. The company behind it is based in Russia.)

Chinese gamers criticising Virus Antidote in reviews say it lacks logic and develops extremely slowly. To speed things up, the game asks players to buy a weekly subscription that costs 28 yuan (US$4), which the company advertises as a 70 per cent discount.

Gamers review bomb a Plague Inc. knockoff after China bans original

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Chinese reviewers accuse the Russian game of being another Chinese copycat

Chinese reviewers accuse the Russian game of being another Chinese copycat