verybody wants to rule the world, but finding a secret base, staffing it with the appropriate underlings and raising the funds to launch the necessary nefarious plots can be such a pain. Enter Evil Genius, a real-time strategy game that offers players the chance to do all that without leaving their living rooms.
In the game, players choose from one of three evil genius "avatars" to represent them within their lair on a remote desert island. The lair begins with a feeble staff of minions and only the most basic of mastermind necessities: barracks for troops, a storeroom for purloined gold and a master control room. As the time passes, new room options—such as security rooms for holding prisoners and monitoring the base's camera system, a conference room for evil genius summits and training rooms for minions—become available.
New minion types also appear as players capture wandering tourists on the island or kidnap knowledgeable individuals from the world beyond, bring them to the security chamber and then torture them until they reveal their advanced knowledge, and thus create minions such as technicians, valets and security officers.
As the base grows, agents and other do-gooders from the outside world begin showing up on the island and must be dealt with. Players can choose to deploy a variety of dastardly traps—including poison gas chambers and giant hurricane-wind-producing fans—or dispatch one of their henchmen and a team of minions to deal with them.
Meanwhile, the evil genius' attention is turned to the world stage, a separate screen that shows the globe divided into different geographic regions. Players deploy minions to these regions for two purposes: to steal money or to uncover plots. These plots require a certain number and type of minions, so while superweapon plots might require several technicians, social ones may demand numerous valets. If successful, plots yield new technologies and minions for the evil genius, increase his or her overall notoriety and build up unwanted global "heat." This heat draws the attention of government agents, who then launch an increased number of raids against the player's secret lair.
A slow boat to campy fun
Evil Genius is designed as a comedic homage to the great super-spy movies of old, particularly those of the James Bond series. On that front, it succeeds: Everything from the opening movie to the silhouetted swimmers on the "save" screen is reminiscent of the 1960s classics. The game is filled with good-natured humor, and while it occasionally touches on distasteful subjects—like torture—it's done in a lighthearted manner evocative of James Bond being strapped down and nearly cut in half by a laser: These sorts of things are just what evil geniuses do. The stylized, slightly cartoonlike graphics are crisp and well animated, and the game experiences few slowdowns.
Unfortunately, while Evil Genius looks great and the running dialogue is amusing, actual gameplay can be ponderous as players wait, wait and wait some more for their wicked plans to be carried out. The game takes place in real time, but unfortunately this means that when the game says it will take three minutes for a plot to be carried out, it really will take three minutes. Similarly, money and additional minions arrive like clockwork every minute or so, but this often leads to the player waiting 10 or 15 minutes for resources to show up. What Evil Genius desperately needs is the Sims-like ability to speed up or slow down the pace of the game, allowing players to quickly accumulate resources or to more effectively deal with do-gooder intruders.
Coping with those super-spy threats can be frustrating. By default, minions and henchmen ignore intruders even if they've managed to penetrate the base's perimeter. Since traps tend to kill as many minions as they do intruders, and since the alarm system is often ineffective, this means that enemy agents can easily slip into the base and start destroying valuable resources while the blissfully ignorant player focuses on the world map. Raising the base's alert setting can help, but being able to set different default actions for minions (like "kill all intruders" or "patrol this area") would have been better.
Evil Genius certainly has its moments, and it can be amusing to play, but it requires more time and patience than many gamers will be willing to commit.
Evil Genius reminded me greatly of Bullfrog's classic Dungeon Keeper series, in which players took on the role of an evil medieval mastermind building, staffing and defending a dungeon. Evil Genius shares its premise and the same wicked sense of humor, but falls short of its excellent gameplay.
— Ken
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