Evil Genius Review

Evil Genius is, as the game’s developers put it, your chance to be Dr. No. It takes some Dungeon Keeper, adds some No One Lives Forever and a dash of Austin Powers, and then blends it all together to create a super villain simulator. If you ever thought James Bond was a little too smug for your tastes, here’s your chance to put him in his place and achieve world domination in the process. However, some of you will find that being a super villain requires a lot more micromanagement than you anticipated. It takes quite a bit of planning to take over the world after all.

You begin the game with a simple choice – who do you want to be? There are three super villains to choose from, your classic height-challenged Dr. No, Dr. Evil type, a fur wearing, filter cigarette smoking femme fatale, and a mysterious Chinese warlord. Each comes with his or her special bonuses such as. They each also have their very own super henchman, which serves as the game’s equivalent of a hero, earning experience and gaining special abilities as the game progresses. They are also very valuable in that they are the only minions in the game that you’ll be able to give direct orders to. The henchmen all draw their inspiration from those appearing in spy movies, particularly Bond movies, with twelve different henchmen appearing in the game.

With your in-game persona selected, you are transported to your island which will serve as home to your all-important secret base. Evil geniuses like to keep their whereabouts secret from prying eyes, so the base has to be built underground. The center of your island consists of a mass of darker colored rock into which you’ll carve out the rooms and corridors of your base. Outside of the money needed to pay for everything, space is probably your most important resource as once you’re out of rock you’re out of room to build. It seems a bit strange, but every time you play the game your island will be the same and you’ll have the same shape and size of area in which to build every time out. It would have been nice to be given the option to build, say, an undersea base, but it’s desert island bases for all. There aren’t even different tilesets available, so no matter which evil genius you select to play as your base will have the Dr. No high-tech sterile look to it.

It should also be noted at this point that there is only a single scenario in the game. Your objectives in each phase are identical each time you play, you’ll unlock new room types and items at the same time, and the available mission-like acts of infamy will open up in the same general progression. Again this strikes me as a little odd for a sim game, as just about every builder sim comes with a variety of scenarios as well as an open-ended sandbox mode these days. These is detrimental to replay value – even though you can experiment with different base layouts and trap placements, you’ll have a hard time shaking off the feeling of déjà vu after playing the game a number of times.

The building aspect of the game is controlled with an intuitive and well-designed interface. Laying out rooms is done with the mouse and you can redraw and reshape the room to your heart’s content before paying for the room or accidentally committing yourself to a misaligned corridor. Once a room has been purchased you must wait for your minions (evil modern versions of the ubiquitous RTS peasant) to blast out the rock and then create the room. There’s some patience required in this process due to Evil Genius’ unique way of handling construction. You can’t directly control your minions so you need to wait for one to finish up his current task before he’ll start on the room. You can use your evil genius to prioritize a room for construction, but this does not guarantee that you’ll get it quickly. This is because to physically place a room or object in your base a minion first must run to your strongroom and grab a briefcase of money, run the money down to the island’s dock, grab a crate from the dock, return to the base, and then unpack the crate at the room or item’s new location. Early in the game the wait is not too long because you have enough minions without anything to do waiting around to build something. However, as your evil empire grows your minions will be quite busy doing other things and it can take a little time before your new room is ready.

Your job in evil genius boils down to three primary tasks – managing your minions, deploying minions out into the world to steal funds for your treasury and perform acts of infamy, and maintaining your base’s security against pesky investigators and super agents.

Each of your minions is rated in areas such as awareness, intelligence, morale, and loyalty and it is in your best interest to keep all of these as high as possible. If not then you may find that your traps capture more of your mindless minions than enemy agents. In order to keep your minions alert and happy you’ll need to devote part of your base to sleeping quarters, cafeterias, training rooms, and the like. Since you can’t tell your minions when to rest or assign them to specific job functions or duties you’ll just have to hope that they find and make use of these facilities on their own. The game does let you create doors with different security settings to keep lower level minions out of certain areas of your base and timeclocks to keep them from working too long at an object (there’s no need to keep the lunch counter manned 24 hours a day), but that’s about the extent of your direction.

One of the aspects of minion control that really tends to bog down the game and make for too much micromanagement is tagging. When agents, police, and their like come snooping around your base they will be ignored by your minions. The idea behind this is that if the agents don’t see anything incriminating, they should be allowed to return to their organizations and report that nothing is unusual with your base, thus reducing their scrutiny of your operations (or “heat” in game terms). So if you want an agent captured or killed, you must click on the agent and specify so. You then need to wait for a minion to take on the job and track down the tagged agent. This is not too bad early in the game, but at times your island will seem to be crawling with agents and it can be a real pain to keep up with them all. Miss one deep in your base and before you know it things will start exploding. You do have the option of declaring a red alert which will cause your minions to attack everything on sight, but doing so causes a big disruption to our base and so it is not practical to use at times other than dire emergencies. Since your base’s interlopers come from different agencies and your heat level can vary between them, it would have been very helpful if the game let you set an overall reaction level to each agency and then used the tagging to override these orders on an individual basis.

Because of the trouble with using minions for security, your best bet in managing security at your base is through an elaborate network of traps. This is by far the most enjoyable aspect of the game as you can create a series of traps to work in unison to capture even the most cautious agents. For example, you can set a pressure plate on the floor that will fire up a jet to blow the agent down the hall to another jet that directly pushes him onto a trapdoor over a bottomless pit. Later in the game you’ll have access to scientists who can research ever more fiendish and clever traps that you can have a great time connecting in many different ways Rube Goldberg style.

An evil genius can’t take over the world without sending his minions out into the world and that’s where the game’s world map comes into play. Once you set up a control center you can send your minions to different regions of the world to steal funds to add to your treasury. They can also look for acts of infamy for you to pull off to increase your notoriety. When acts of infamy are uncovered, you can assign your minions in the region to attempt to pull off the crime and if they succeed your notoriety will increase and you’ll be eligible to take on more and more daring capers. You’ll also increase attention from law enforcement and espionage agencies which will in turn increase the risk of losing minions in the field and of having the agencies send operatives to infiltrate your base.