Evil Genius 2
PC
Playing Evil Genius 2, you begin to appreciate just how much work must go into even the most inept Bond villain’s schemes. A sequel to Elixir Studios’ cult 2004 strategy game, this is a vibrant, characterful management sim where you choose one from four colourful and varied masterminds –including a tyrannical Soviet general played, loudly, by Flash Gordon’s Brian Blessed – then construct a secret lair and attempt to take over the world with them.
Doing so involves an often head-spinning amount of micromanagement, from training minions to do your dirty work and keeping an eye on your budget (being evil is expensive) to researching new technology and laying traps to prevent tuxedo-clad secret agents from sneaking in and blowing the place up. The bright, approachable art might lead you to believe this is a light-touch sim in the vein of Two Point Hospital, itself a modern refresh of a beloved management game. But Evil Genius 2 is surprisingly complex and challenging – especially in the late game when those agents come thick and fast and gold trickles out of your vault at an alarming rate.
The game is built around two distinct layers, the most frequently visited of which is the base screen. Here, you construct your lair, carving rooms and corridors out of the rock, while dealing with the day-to-day management of your operation. Capturing intruders and interrogating them, shooting minions in front of their colleagues to assert your dominance, and shouting at people so they work harder are just a few of the things you get up to. You also have to spend time building the casino that acts as the legitimate front for your evil empire – investing in slot machines, cocktail bars, baccarat tables, stage shows and whatever else has the potential to distract any secret agents that happen to be snooping around.
Base-building is a delight, thanks to snappy controls, expressive animation and a wonderfully chunky, readable visual style that ensures you can always locate what you’re looking for at a glance. In terms of pure feel, Rebellion couldn’t have done a much better job. It’s a magnificent-looking game, and we regularly find ourselves pulling the camera into the air to watch our base teem with life and activity below.
However, the world map, the game’s other main layer, isn’t nearly as compelling. From here, you send minions on so-called schemes, which might be robbing a bank or kidnapping someone. But these capers involve little more than clicking on an icon on the map and waiting for a timer to tick down. Everything exciting happens offscreen, which is disappointing when everything else in the game is so lovingly presented and animated. Dipping in and out of the world map to monitor these schemes becomes tiresome, to the point where we stop reading the missions’ whimsical flavour text altogether. It doesn’t take long to stop caring about what these jobs actually entail, meaning you’ll choose them based entirely on the reward offered, which leaves the whole experience feeling rather empty. Yet it’s an essential part of the game, so you have no choice but to engage with it. You’ve a constant need for cash in Evil Genius 2, despite the stacks of sparkling gold bars in your base’s vaults suggesting otherwise, and these schemes are the most efficient way to generate it.
Schemes generate heat, which can alert the Forces Of Justice (the good guys, essentially) to your nefarious activities. The more trouble you cause in the world, the more agents will turn up at your casino, looking for a way to sneak into your lair. If they get in, they can sabotage generators and cut the power, blow up expensive equipment or kill minions, which is where the game’s vast array of absurd traps comes into play. These include deadly laser grids, giant boxing gloves on springs, water tanks filled with man-eating sharks, and pinball bumpers that you can use to comically launch enemy agents into other traps. This adds an element of tower defence to the game. As your empire grows, more agents will turn up, and in greater numbers. At first it’s bumbling private investigators who are easily distracted by valet minions or captured by your muscle. But later, skilled 007-inspired super-agents are sent in, and these can cause real problems if they slip through the net. When an agent (or, often, a group of agents) shows up, you have to locate them on the map, tag them and decide how you want your minions to deal with them.
This, along with all the other plates you have to keep spinning, means there’s rarely a quiet moment in Evil Genius 2, which can become exhausting. The game also regularly loses steam, and you find yourself in a kind of limbo: low on gold, waiting for schemes to finish, progressing very slowly through overlong missions called Side Stories that are made up of multiple subobjectives. There’s a fast-forward button to speed things up, but it’s not quite fast enough. Eventually your base grows to an immense size, covering several floors, which means it takes an increasingly long time for your minions to move around it and perform their duties.
The result is a game with energy and personality in abundance, but it fizzles out too easily. Yet it picks up again as the end draws near and progress speeds up on your doomsday device, a construction project needed to conquer the world and win the game. And even when the mid-game sags, the devs’ clear love for the subject matter is usually enough to keep you playing. It’s heaving with well-observed references to ’60s spy movies, and the music – which riffs on John Barry’s James Bond scores – is pitch-perfect. Its sense of fun is infectious, and the physical comedy is elevated by some exceptional animation. Despite its pacing issues and overabundance of micromanagement, this is a deep, layered and charming management sim.
Surprisingly complex and challenging, especially in the late game when secret agents come at you thick and fast