Evil Genius

-You expect me to talk? -No, I expect you to die, Mr. Bond! If you ever wondered why all James Bond series villains are losing all the time, then it's your chance to do everything properly.

The concept for this game, and many of the ideas in it are excellent, but playing can be a chore. You basically play as Dr. Evil attempting to build a doomsday weapon to take over the world. It plays similar to Dungeon Keeper (where you don't have direct control over minions). You do however have henchmen that you can directly control when needed (such as when you *really* need someone not to be alive). Unfortuneatly there is a lot in this game that does not work; like having a hotel as a front. It's a great concept, but the tourists will never stay on that area of the island, they always wander into your base and start causing issues. Another major problem is the low (default) unit cap, by late game it's exceptionally difficutt to keep progressing with the 100 unit cap as you need to ensure you have a cash flow income by stealing; which raises noteriaty; which makes the governments send enemies to your base; wich now needs more people defending it (also it turns out that the best people to have when defending your base are also the best at stealing...). Even then I'de say the game is worth a shot, look online on how to alter the game ini file to allow more minions and you'll have a better time

While the concept of the game and stylish design are top notch, the execution leaves much to be desired. I love a good strategy building game, but Evil Genius really fails at meeting a steady pace and giving the player the appropriate resources and escalation of difficulty. For example, the fact that you must use minions to steal resources from the world as your only means of income, yet doing so causes attention and subsequent attacks upon those minions at such a pace that it's too easy to have no income at all is distressing. That the game does not alert you to these events as they happen is just poor planning. What's worse is that you can set up hotels on your island for exorbitant cost that bring absolutely no income to your organization, and have only week general game affects. Another big problem is the lack of pausing the real-time aspects of the game when you enter into the world planning screen. Too many times I switched back to my base to see enemy agents freely walking around my corridors. Still, it is a fun game to tool around on for a while, so it's not a total waste of money. Just that when I think about other games in this genre (Dungeon Keeper, Tropico, Sim City), Evil Genius just can't hold up.

I remember when I originally played this I lost interest... this time I thought it would be different as I jumped in and instantly found myself addicted again. Great music, lovely style... lots to do. It's fun. I love the base building elements and the training of my minions. I like micro management, so I'm quite happy to tinker and balance between making money, expanding, training etc. I start to remember why I lost interest, however... at a certain point the game becomes laborious. You'll go to the world stage to find 10 of your people just died... just like that. nothing you can do. Waves of enemies start hitting your base... and you get caught in a war of attrition. Constantly spending money to get new recruits, to train them, for them to die and repeat and repeat. What doesn't help is there's very little control over your minions. I'd like to stand guards and henchmen (henchpeople?) near the entrance to be on alert, but they wander off so that when something bad happens they're nowhere nearby. After spending hours today getting nowhere very quickly, I'm going to delete it... because it is addictive. And it is easy to keep going back for more. But it's ultimately futile.

First off, don't play this game on win 8. It tends to crash in important parts of the game and don't even hope to build that second island - it will crash at the end of the cinematic. The game itself is a lot of fun, tons of carton humor, like interrogating enemy agents in a giant cake mixer, stealing the Eiffel tower. The style of the game works well, you really get the feel of controlling a group like Blowfelts SPECTER, you get a ton of nasty traps and rooms to build and minions in lots of different types. But at times you really feel like gunning them down. The social minions are the worst, they tend to die in vast numbers. Regretfully you need them, both to deal with fires in your base and to complete acts of infamy - that you need to complete in order to advance the game story. Your enemies are the worlds superpowers, they will send waves of different agent types after you. The strength of these agents will depend on just how badly you've upset a given superpower. Every act of infamy you complete will anger the target superpower and in time they will send 'Bond' like super agents after you. Their a total pain, but in time you can find out there weakness. And yes, finishing them off is very satisfying. But for some reason the games designer's missed a lot of important game elements out of the game. Their are two islands/maps, both part of the story and that's it, just the main story. For its price its really worth playing, if like me you enjoy being the bad guy.