1. WilliamM

   10

   Evil Genius was a game that begged for a sequel and one was FINISHED, but the creators of Tropico shelved it when they acquired the rights.

   • Helpful? 4 of 6 users said Yes.
2. Posh_Bear

   8

   This review contains spoilers, click expand to view. This game, overall, is an experience you would be mad to pass up. This, however, is dampened by a lot of small, niggling issues that crop up over the course of the game, and that by the end, have you wanting to dominate the world for more than one reason. Evil Genius is, in theory, the antithesis to the hordes of 'good pure hero' stories that dominate the market. Much like Dungeon Keeper, you play the role of the evil, vengeful and hugely spiteful bad guy. It's a brilliant spin on the concept, concisely taking the piss out of James Bond, Rambo and a whole host of 80's stereotypes, allowing you to turn the tables on the pesky do-gooders and use their own patented movie-logic against them. Now, every evil genius needs minions, especially a genius as inept as you. While you play as one of three avatars with variously diabolical backgrounds and perks, they don't seem to be capable of a whole load. They stand around, give a stat-boost to nearby minions, and can prioritize the use or construction of a single object. That's it. I expected to be able to do more than that with a character who's capable of formulating a plot to bring the entire world to its knees. But no problem, right? Because you've got a whole host of minions to do your evil bidding, like a flock of detachable hands, or something. Except you can't control them directly. I'm fine with that. It's a neat little gameplay mechanic in itself. You can set objects to be built, moved, destroyed or researched. You can designate the need for minions of a certain type in the big wide world, and tag enemy agents with various treatments. None of this needs any micromanagement, as your minions are totally autonomous. They react according to the stimui you place in the environment. Their AI is, at times, atrocious. Managing flow through corridors, despite being a neat little concept that makes sense, is made frustrating by the fact that, no matter how many routes are avaliable, the minions take the shortest. No matter how congested, or dangerous. Wonder why your minions aren't training? They're all standing around, waiting for eachother, at the T-Junction at the entrance to your base. Or walking really, really slowly to where they need to be. Sometimes, tasks just WONT happen. No reason is evident. Minions are free, the path is unobstructed, but the object won't be placed, the research won't be done. The captive won't be executed, leading to their escape and destruction of half your base from the inside. Oops, sorry. Your minions were too busy playing pinball, or standing around, oogling all your tasty, tasy stolen loot. The game is seperated into two sections: your base management, which covers a small island, and a control-roomesque overview of the world, seperated into sections, inside which are Acts of Infamy to complete, both optional and mandatory. You can kidnap people to train better minions, steal money, plot to discover new Acts, steal Loot, and blow things up. Each Act is unique and funny, but you don't get to see it happening. Your view never shifts from the control room, so when your minions blow up Nevada, you get a short generic radio-broadcast clip from the attacked region of the world, some of your minion tokens fall over, and... oh, and your Heat goes up. There are two gagues of how well you're operating in the world. Notoriety, which is 'good', and Heat, which is 'bad'. Notoriety goes up in small amounts, almost never down, and displays how much you're respected and feared. Heat is how much a particular government wants to murder the **** out of you, and how many troops of what type and skill they're going to send to your island. It goes down over time, sloooowly. Notoriety has little use. Aside from a few arbitrary mission goals, and the ability to recruit directly-controlable, semi-invincible Henchmen from the world at various points of progress, it serves to do pretty much arse-all that is beneficial. It does attract the world leaders version of Henchmen, Super Agents, to your island, and they're a real pain. Henchmen, while not defeatable by ordinary Agents, can be killed by the frankly overpowered Super Agents. And late in the game, because you can do little except stall them until you unlock their 'defeat' mission, the Agents get really, really tiresome. It's a brilliant concept, with huge amounts of loving detail. Minions group together in their off-time and smoke, the graphic style is impeccable, and the reflections and shine make everything beautiful. Grapically, it's a 10/10. Conceptually, it's a 10/10. In the execution, things fall flat. There's not enough incentive or reward to complete Acts, Henchmen are mostly redundant, enemies are overpowered in the endgame. But by god, is it one of the most worthwhile games I've ever played, if only because it's a beacon of an underplayed genre with megalitres of potential. It could have been done a LOT worse.… Expand

   • Helpful? 0 of 0 users said Yes.
3. MarkH.

   6

   A user here rated the demo, not the game. Unfortunately the game does not quite work as well as the demo did because of one or two flaws that are apparant only after playing the full version over a longer period of time. The first and major flaw is the pacing of the game. Time and time again you will be forced to wait for your heat levels to go down, or wait to recruit lost minions, or wait to uncover evil deeds on the world map, or wait, or wait.....you get the idea. Especially at the beggining, the game is punctuated by short bursts of action followed by lengthy periods of waiting. It took me 15/20 minutes of real time recruit enough minions - only to have over half of them wiped out by some agents. QUE: waiting another 15-20 mins of not doing much while you recruit more staff, and this was while spending the maximum on staff recruitment. Spend less (as your often forced to unless you use the money cheat) and the waiting times can be multiplied by over 4 times that! So you spend more on staff recruting, which means you need to amass more money, which means MORE WAITING as your minions steal from around the world. No matter what you want to do in the game, it always seems to result in you being pointed towards the same situation. WAITING. Want more money for faster recruiting? - WAIT for your minions to steal. Want to commit more acts of evil on the world map? WAIT for your minions to discover them first. Completed som acts of evil? Then you will have generated some heat, too much heat and your base will be overrun with "good" agents. So you WAIT for your heat levels to drop again before you can do anything else. Also the minion AI is not all that good. By design they will stand around doing nothing while your overrun with enemy agents. You HAVE to tell them what to do to EACH and EVERY enemy that wonders into your base, by clicking infividually on the agent. Your minions are incapable of making any smart choices themselves, and sometimes seem incapable of doing what you instruct them to do anyway. Add all this together and the only people who will see the later (and ironically more interesting) game elements will be those with a LOT of patience!!… Expand

   • Helpful? 1 of 1 users said Yes.
4. Jok`RdeMo

   3

   They have just taken Dungeon Keeper and made it little bit different (I could say weak, bad etc). I can just say that Dungeon Keeper2 was much more interesting than this. Very, very boring game.… Expand

   • Helpful? 0 of 0 users said Yes.

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