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
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.
A great concept with, sadly, flawed execution.
This game captures the atmosphere of being a James Bond villain very well. You build a
secret island base, send minions off around the world to perform dastardly deeds, and fight
off agents from world governments.
Unfortunately, while the atmosphere is lovely, the gameplay kind of sucks. You spend most of your time sending your minions off on missions in order to get money, but this process is bland and repetitive. You don't get to guide your minions on their mission a la XCom, you simply wait until a timer ticks down.
Base building is passable, but suffers similar problems to Dungeon Keeper. You're given tools like security cameras and alarms and loudspeakers and traps, in order to automate your base defenses, but it's almost always simpler, easier and more effective to directly order your minions to respond to threats. This makes all your cool toys more or less pointless.
There's also some kind of... hotel building simulation? Apparently, to avoid detection, you need to build and run a hotel on your island to distract stray tourists, so they don't stumble on your base? In effect, you're expected to maintain a boring, bog-standard hotel while also maintaining an evil hideout. I didn't find that fun at all.
There's no way to skip past the tutorial stages of the game. In fact, there doesn't appear to be different levels either (or maybe I didn't get up to them?). You end up unlocking new room types when the game thinks you need to have them. The problem is that you can't easily alter your base design once it's set out. You have to pre-plan for rooms you're going to get in the future, but you don't yet know what they are, what they do, how they work or how useful they're going to be until you get to try them out. I found I ended up restarting once I knew how all the rooms worked, but playing up through the starting stages again is tedious...
In short, this game could have benefitted tremendously from some relatively simple changes: different levels and/or a skirmish mode, some way to skip the tutorials and unlock all rooms from the beginning, and dropping the "hotel" crap. It could have been even better if you got to actually do anything on the missions you send your minions on, such as a transition to some kind of minigame a la XCom.
Instead of this game, I'd recommend Dungeon Keeper or maybe even Dwarf Fortress (assuming you haven't played them before). That said, you can't really go wrong paying $5 to play this and see for yourself. The delivery is charming and the execution is competant, it just has a few things holding it back from true greatness.
This is a game that is very much compared to the famed Dungeon Keeper, (why isnt THAT on gog?) It takes the same elements, make evil lair, build base, defeat good, and adds the whole spy-spoof layer onto it. However, the similarities end there. The game is a good game, but it feels short, with only two islands. The reason the game takes so long, is you tend to lose a lot of minions to super agents and the world map missions. It is not a fast paced game by any standards, taking time to train your minions up from the classic yellow jump suit construction worker into any one of the 6 end tier classes, but each job that they can progress into is very unique, with each one bringing their own set of skills for you to use. At 9.99 I absolutely must recommend this game, but its re-playability isnt all that great.
This is a game with a great concept, great theme, and fun mechanics.
However, after some time it begins to wear thin, since there isn't really a huge amount to do other than build your base and allocate resources for missions. You change islands once (or twice), but basically the gameplay doesn't change after the tutorial. Sure it's fun unlocking different traps and machines, but after some time it feels like a bit of a grind.
Recommended for a few quick plays, rather than a long sitting.
OK, I'm not going to go in to HEAVY detail on the game here, because honestly Blackdrazon covers more, better than I could have.
There is something he doesn't go in to:
Controls.
First, the controls of the game are not the most intuitive. This is forgivable, just annoying to get used to though.
The real problem is the tactical control, or.. lack there of.
Unless you tag them, enemy agents can walk right in to your base, without alarms raised, minions freaking, etc. (Well, you'll get an alert that your security door was bypassed), they won't even do anything when the agents start shooting your equipment. There is also no way to automatically set enemy agents to hostile.
Also, I don't know about you, but if I were an evil genius and had a base like that, I would have a very detailed defensive plan, that when the alarm sounded, everyone knew where they belonged and what they needed to be doing.
Instead, if you put it on high alert, sometimes your minions will run out of your base after foes.. one at a time, and get picked off.
There are several other significant flaws, but many of them are fixed in various patches, or by simple mods.
Over all, it's well worth playing. Just don't expect epic win.
This game is waiting for a review. Take the first shot!
{{ item.rating }}
{{ item.percentage }}%
Awaiting more reviews
An error occurred. Please try again later.
Other ratings
Awaiting more reviews
Add a review
Edit a review
Your rating:
Stars and all fields are required
Not sure what to say? Start with this:
What kept you playing?
What kind of gamer would enjoy this?
Was the game fair, tough, or just right?
What’s one feature that really stood out?
Did the game run well on your setup?
Inappropriate content. Your reviews contain bad language.
Inappropriate content. Links are not allowed.
Inappropriate content. Content contains gibberish.
Review title is too short.
Review title is too long.
Review description is too short.
Review description is too long.
Not sure what to write?
You cannot save your review due to the following reasons:
You need to select star rating
You need to enter review title
You need to enter the content of your review
Show:
5 on page
15 on page
30 on page
60 on page
Order by:
Most helpful
Most positive
Most critical
Most recent
Filters:
No reviews matching your criteria
Written in
English
Deutsch
polski
français
русский
中文(简体)
Others
Written by
Verified ownersOthers
Added
Last 30 daysLast 90 daysLast 6 monthsWheneverAfter releaseDuring Early Access
Your review should focus on your in-game experience only. Let the game stand entirely on its own merits.
Avoid noise
To discuss topics such as news, pricing, or community, use our forums. To request new games and website or GOG GALAXY features, use the community wishlist. To get technical support for your game contact our support team.
Critique responsibly
To keep our review sections clean and helpful, we will remove any reviews that break these guidelines or our terms of use.
Ok, got it
GOG Patrons who helped preserve this game
Error loading patrons. Please refresh the page and try again.
