Build a secret base, gain notoriety by completing daring missions, repel the forces of justice in real-time combat, and develop evil super-weapons to complete your nefarious master plan.
As a malevolent mastermind bent on achieving global domination, through the construction of the ultimate doomsday...
Build a secret base, gain notoriety by completing daring missions, repel the forces of justice in real-time combat, and develop evil super-weapons to complete your nefarious master plan.
As a malevolent mastermind bent on achieving global domination, through the construction of the ultimate doomsday device, Evil Genius gives you all the dastardly with none of the muttley.
A tongue-in-cheek take on the spy thrillers of the '60s, offering you the unique opportunity to play the villain as you control a secret island fortress complete with powerful henchmen, loyal minions, ice-cold beauty queens, and a host of hilarious gizmos.
Will you dare to try how evil you are? In this real-time mad scientist lair management strategic simulation, you can!
Become the ultimate villain and take over the world!
Fun-packed gameplay with humor and cliché lurking around every corner
Unique, memorable characters and stylish, cartoonish visuals
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
Excellent style and ideas cannot make up for serious gameplay issues
I really want to like Evil Genius. It has a lot of great features- the game is loaded with style, game play mechanics are creative and interesting and the premise is both engaging and immersing. But I cannot recommend the game because none of the many great ideas the game have actually work together.
AI is the main killer- not only is it unpredictable and unreliable, it's frequently buggy. There's no way of organizing units, and the operate at their own volition. While this seems like a good idea in theory it rarely works- placing kill tags on enemy agents does not direct enemies to engage in any sort of offensive, they simple file towards the enemy until he/she's dead. Seeing 5 marksmen die from melee attacks filing towards an enemy is infuriating. In the end weaken is the only safe way to take care of enemies and this is not always effective, especially if there are multiple targets.
Traps are another faltering point, in the end they just don't have any use. It seems like a great idea to lace the entrance to a lair with traps, or certain parts of the base, but issues arise because minions as minions so frequently have to go outside, they are constantly passing through traps. Enemy agents can follow minions through the traps without triggering, which is bad enough, but more annoying is when they trigger traps, which usually ends up killing more of your men than of theirs. Then there are times when your minions set off traps, especially if they are damaged, which happens far more often than it should. Against strong foes traps are totally ineffectual, as most agents just destroy the sensors and the traps with guns or feet, forcing you to replace them.
The world screen is also a seemingly good idea that goes terribly wrong. Raiding the world for money and researching events seems like a great idea, but heat ratings are much too unforgiving, and sending enough men away to build up a revenue tends to attract large numbers of agents- managing away teams and defense is much too fine a balance. Away teams also frequently disobey orders, coming out of hiding before agents of justice have left the region, leading to the death of hard to replace specialists without your even knowing. If things get hectic during lair management, which they often do, it's hard to keep up with the world screen, and it can be very irritating to finish dealing with one incursion to find your away teams obliterated by agents of justice.
Again there are a lot of fantastic things about this game, but after more than a few hours of play it's impossible to focus on anything but the things I've mentioned in this review. Management games are hard to get right, and only a few gleam as truly functional, replayable games. Evil Genius is not one of them.
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.
Absoloutely brilliant and unique game - setting up traps to foil goody-two-shoes spies, training troops, building power generators and plotting the demise of your adversaries on your own secret evil island.
Any novelty of being the badass soldier is all but worn off due to uncountable number of FPS games released, but never before have I seen the opportunities to be a 60's-style super villian. For $9.99, it's an absolute steal, and I WILL be picking this up again soon.
As vital to the GoG collection as Fallout. Unfortunately, I do not remember any simulation of cat stroking but thankfully this can be achieved in real life by grabbing the nearest fuzzy object and stroking it on your lap (easy), thankfully real cats can easily be picked up from your nearest animal shelter or neighbour's garden. I also recommend a swivel chair so you can twist around and laugh maniacally at your screen once that damned pesky spy falls prey to your wit. For the full experience, I would advise shaving your head and wearing a monocle.
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