Plenty of games like Grand Theft Auto or Postal have a healthy streak of misanthropy, but Pandemic 2 brings its own unique flavor to the table.

In this game, your job is to create a disease and nurture it along as it’s spread worldwide by airplane travellers and cargo ships. The game ends when your disease is beaten back by drugs and vaccines or everyone on Earth is dead.

As someone who gets the willies just reading about flu pandemics and cytokine storms, I found the idea intriguing. But while Pandemic 2 has a fascinating setup, it has some gameplay problems that keep it from reaching its full potential.

Your disease starts as a basic virus, bacterium or parasite. As more people are infected, you earn points to give the disease new traits. You might up its resistance to drugs, make it spreadable by rodents or give it new symptoms. Something like coughing will help the disease spread while switching on pulmonary edemas. Symptoms also increase the visibility of the disease, which in turn makes it more likely that governments will respond to the threat by closing their borders or eradicating vermin.

The problem is, visibility doesn’t seem to do much in practice, and governments will close their borders before your disease can get a foothold worldwide. This seems to be an ironclad defense, unfortunately. Even if everyone in Canada is gasping their last, not one case will slip across the border into the U.S. That kind of limits the strategies you can take to upping the contagiousness of the disease as fast as possible and hoping you can slip into every country before turning on the lethality, but some countries like Madagascar seem to close their borders for outbreaks of what amounts to the common cold.

So, that’s Pandemic 2. It’s a good idea, but I think it needs some better modeling of disease transmission to really come into its own.

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