Undead INC takes an incredibly interesting concept and presents it for players to experience. Imagine you are running a shady, ethnically flexible pharmaceutical company to produce a profit at any cost. Now imagine some avenues for that profit involve developing and selling incredibly dangerous bioweapons, such as weaponized gorillas and zombie soldiers. That’s Undead INC.
The idea of basically running the Umbrella Corporation is an insanely cool fantasy to sell to players. Aesthetically, Undead INC delivers on that idea pretty well. However, there are many issues and little missing features in the game’s actual mechanics that left me disappointed and feeling like Undead INC didn’t live up to the hype I had for it.

The main gameplay mechanic in Undead INC is to manage and run both a legitimate and illegitimate pharmaceutical company. On the legitimate side, you diagnose patients with doctor visits and then produce and sell them medicine at your pharmacies. On the illegitimate side, you develop bioweapons to export on the black market illegally. You have an increasingly steep franchise fee to pay each week and must manage both sides of your business while dealing with police attention, employee health and secrecy, and vertical expansion of your business.
Awesome concept. Honestly, it’s a flawless idea that I’m surprised I haven’t seen before. Unfortunately, the game fails on a lot of basic mechanics I would really want to see in a game like this, which sort of makes it a bummer to play.
Naturally, as the manager of such a prestigious, totally legal, and moral business, it is your job to create income, both to run the facility and to pay your weekly franchise fee. You, of course, have both daily expenses on top of this, and rather than a passive income, your profit comes directly from sales.
Undead INC’s financial management screen looks like this.

My issue here is that you can’t see what the products you actually sell for. All you get is your flat profit/loss for a day and the daily demand for the goods you’re selling. I think the game does this in part because it expects you to make most of your money from the Black Market, which buys goods in bulk. However, since I don’t know what anything sells for, I never know if the goods I just produced 50 of were worth the cost of producing or if I would actually make more money just selling them over the counter over time instead of dumping a bunch into a Black Market order.
This sort of takes away many of the financial decision-making you would want to make in a management game. Unfortunately, it doesn’t free you up to do a whole lot else because the actual bioweapon development in the game is pretty underwhelming.
It basically comes down to just buying a room and progressing through a 4X style tech tree that is surprisingly limited in scope and one that frequently has blocked out research without telling you why you can’t actually research what you’re trying to. You would expect the game to constantly experiment with genes and theorums, create complex and interesting zombies, and play the “don’t let them break out and Racoon City this place” game. Instead, the game just has you click a box, and you can make a type of zombie now. Strangely enough, there is more effort and options for producing basic firearms than for creating bioweapons in this game about bioweapons.

Speaking of, the game’s actual construction is also pretty restrictive and unexciting. It uses the “Fallout Shelter” style of letting you fill in spaces with specific rooms that accomplish their own tasks. Unfortunately, there is no actual room construction. You have to fill in the rooms you’re given and “Excavage” more pre-generated room slots hidden behind rock.
Facilities that require you to place them underground have you search the map for an entrance down below and then blow up rocks to uncover the rooms big enough. This usually means you won’t get big money makers or cool illegal research facilities for a while as you save time and effort to discover these locations. It also means your secret underground facility is weirdly disconnected from your HQ and just.. in the sewers?
It’s weirdly disappointing that I can’t build my own massive facility, connected by long stretches of tunnels and big closeable steel airlock doors. I want my evil bioweapon facility to feel big and villainous, not like I’m squatting in a shack in the sewer for some reason.
Other issues actually interrupted the gameplay itself, such as the police shooting my innocent doctors in cold blood just right in the middle of the street. I found this especially confusing, considering I literally had not done anything illegal yet in that particular game.
I also experienced quite a few desktop crashes. Sometimes, these happened in the middle of gameplay, halting and resetting some of my progress. Other times, they would happen in the main menu for some reason. I could never really identify why my game was crashing, but it just sort of did.
What really gets to me is that certain aspects of the game feel like they had way more effort put into them than others. Namely, the game’s art and writing are pretty good, delivering a grim and darkly humorous setting that feels unapologetically critical of the medical industry. It almost feels like the game’s art and writing were done first or at least worked on with a little more care.

What disappoints me most about Undead INC is that the game has a fantastic premise but seems to have lacked the time or drive to really execute it. It feels like someone had a great idea, and then the project was either rushed or made with parameters that restricted what it could be. It almost feels, to me, like wasted potential. Others might not feel the same way, but I personally think that the game has about two to five hours of content before it becomes worth setting aside forever.
The Final Word
Undead INC takes an amazing concept and fails to fully realize it. Be it a lack of time or vision, the game feels incomplete, coasting off a great idea and doing very little to execute on its own potential. You might find something to enjoy in Undead INC, but I personally don’t recommend it.
Try Hard Guides received a PC review code for this game. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles in the Game Reviews section of our website! Undead INC is available on Steam.
Comments