Alien Virus

Alien Virus is a role-playing game set after a global outbreak of Mutantvirus-17. In 2031, the virus erupts at a secret laboratory in Hank City. The mayor conceals the outbreak, and the airborne infection spreads around the world, killing billions. In less than three weeks, humanity falls to five percent of its former population and retreats underground to its last stronghold, Dalan City. As a member of the reconnaissance corps, you protect the survivors, fight the mutants and help rebuild civilization while investigating whether the disaster was an accident or deliberate.

Choose your skills

After completing the new recruit instructor’s final test, you can join a department. Each department has its own traits, skills and combat role. Earn job points through combat and spend them with department instructors to learn skills. You can also study five types of magic—water, fire, wind, light and dark—at the Magic Pavilion. Magic is available to every job and does not consume TP, so you can combine it with a job’s skills, such as playing a magic swordsman or magic martial artist.

Combat uses a CTB system. Agility affects turn order, and high agility can let you attack several times before a monster can reach you. The game uses only hit rate and evasion rate calculations: the attacker’s hit rate minus the defender’s evasion rate determines the chance to hit. Equipment, skills and socketed stones can all help you prepare your party.

Build your party

In the residential district, choose characters to join your adventures and freely combine their jobs, attributes and equipment. You can equip a heavily armored archer or mage, for example, or a swordsman with high agility who wields a greatsword. Equipment slots include head, body, legs, shoes, rings, necklaces and earrings; weapons include a main weapon and a magic book. Gear can also provide additional stats such as HP recovery, TP recovery, evasion and critical hits.

Crafted equipment has variable stats, with a 20–30% range, and pieces of the same type can differ in how many times they can be enhanced and how many gems they can hold. Enhancement stones of different types and levels raise equipment stats by different amounts. Use the rare Purification Stone to reset enhanced equipment, then socket gems to suit a character’s role.

Gather and grow

Trees, ores, gems and fibers appear randomly across the maps and can be gathered with tools; tool quality affects gathering speed and the quality of the resources. As the story progresses, you gain a farm where you can grow more than 30 types of crops, herbs and trees. Plants take different amounts of time to grow, and watering them with different qualities of water can speed their growth. Each crop has a use, and the farm can even produce enhancement stones. You can upgrade the farm to grow more plants, and improve the pump motor to double the rate at which river water is replenished. A special crop, the Surprise Tree, can grow from a seed and may yield a gift.

Mine and cook

With enough materials and the right equipment, you can build a temporary mine on your farm. It automatically produces ore over real time, with higher-level mines yielding greater quantities and quality. You can also enter a mine to gather richer deposits than those found on regular maps. Mine layouts are randomly generated, even for mines of the same level.

The cooking system includes 80 recipes, including potions, meals that provide combat buffs and dishes with other special effects.

Defend and reclaim

Mutants periodically attack the underground city in groups, and you must return to defend its survivors. Early on, you learn about incoming attacks through telegrams from soldiers on the front line. Later in the story, you obtain an important component that lets you build a radar station and estimate when the next attack will arrive.

Graduating from the combat academy brings greater responsibilities: you must reclaim the towns where people once lived. Once you clear all the mutants from an area, survivors can move there, and the town’s guards give you rewards at regular intervals.