Evil Genius

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 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.

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.

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.

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.