Evil Genius

Among strategy games, where you get to BE THE BAD GUY, and DEFEND YOUR DOMAIN, it COULD have been that great, but honestly? Compared to the "Dungeon Keeper" games that were released for PC, it's FAR too slow-paced. What a shame; it COULD have been a MASTERPIECE! But instead, I've been playing it and, it's just not very good. At least it isn't one of those terrible social games & idle clickers, for mobile devices!

Let me begin by saying that Evil Genius is one of my most favorite games of all time. As a kid, I used to play it for hours on end on my parents' PC. With that said, buying it from GOG.com today proved a very big disappointment. Let me walk you through the events. Wanting to revisit a childhood classic, I look up "Evil Genius Mac" on google, hoping to find a website that sells a compatible version. I find GOG.com, and readily pay the full price of $10. For most platforms, this is generally the most difficult part, after which all you have to do is install the game and play. Not so with gog.com. Apparently, their version of Evil Genius is mac-compatible, but only up to snow leopard or so, leaving out all Mac owners that have had a system update in the past 7 years. Now, I must get out of my way to find a fix to play the game I just bought, already thinking to myself that spending those $10 was a bad idea. Visiting the gog.com forum I come across many people who had experienced a similar problem. I update the wineskin wrapper to the latest version, which will in principle solve the issue. Meanwhile, I am bewildered that a legit game store would sell a "Mac compatible game" that's simply the PC version wrapped in a wineskin. Very unprofessional, but I am willing to let it slide, as long as my game works. It does, BUT with a very inconvenient caveat: it crashes CONSTANTLY. The worst part is the unpredictability. Sometimes it will crash after a miserly two minutes, while others I will be playing for an hour, almost convinced that the problem has waned, and the damn crash will strike me by surprise, taking me back to the last autosave. This experience has been a huge letdown, and I would do anything to get my money back and it's why gog and other websites should not be marketing PC games with Wineskin wrappers as "mac games" TL;DR: don't buy if you have a Mac!!!

Despite the great art, and fun ideas, this game is ham-strung without a slider to control the rate at which time passes. Sometimes the game is dull and slow and other times, too much is going on. Aside from that, and a poor interface, it's an interesting toy to play with for about 30-45 minutes.