Evil Genius

Rating:
Summary: Has great highs and bad lows
Review: Evil Genius is an amazingly addictive strategy game (sort of a Sims game). It has great humor, great graphics, great sound, and lots of great gameplay. Unfortunately it has some moments of really boring gameplay as well as some downright frustration.

In the game you build an evil lair and send your minions around the world doing evil deeds. Meanwhile you raise cash, more minions, build a bigger base, buid traps, and defend your base against the nasty do-gooder agents (ala James Bond) trying to take you down.

Doing all of these things is great fun. Just deciding on your base design is fun and the graphic animations are terrifc so just watching things happen is entertaining. Unfortunately you really need to read between the lines of the goals as well as read the manual a few times (and the online help) to figure out exactly how things work. It is very easy to get stuck in moments where not much is really going on and you can't figure out what you are supposed to do next. It is very easy for the boring moments to go on for hours.

Fortunately the game will easily take you 40 hours or more to complete and you will certainly want to play it at least one more time to incorporate all you learned on your first play.

Overall, Evil Genius is a great mix of strategy and campy humor that will probably keep you playing long into the night. Just don't be surprised if some of those hours are frustrating.

Rating:
Summary: The delight of being evil
Review: Evil Genius: The game you can't live without if you've ever had the urge to stroke white fluffy cats while speaking in a sinister tone, and own your own Doomsday Device.

You have three choices for your Evil Genius: Alexis, the beautiful heiress whose charm allows her to keep minions loyal far longer than the other two. Maximilliam, a megalomaniac entrepeneur, and Shen Yu the Inescrutable Lord from China.

All of them are, of coure, stereotypes of the typical Bond Villains. Back when James Bond was good and scottish, before a certain cocky englishman hopped into the movies.
You get your typical Piranha tank traps. Beehive traps, laser traps, blade traps, etcetera.

The goal of the game is assembling your Doomsday Device. Of course, near the middle of the game when you get really notorious after you've tampered in the world, you have "Special Agents" coming after you being sent by governments from the five continents. They are tough and hard to beat. But when you capture them and send them for interrogation and/or torture, your Evil Genius automatically walks to the placce of torture and starts laughing and rubbing his or her hands.

Of course, the Special Agent has a high chance of breaking out of the trap.

In fact, it is very hard to kill the Special Agents. But that doesn't make the game unwinnable: Evil does triumph if you are smart enough.
Specially with creating traps that connect. Should one of the poor sods slip, be prepared to laugh at the beautiful chain reaction!



The whole game is great with parody and spoof on Bond-esque.

For example, one of the tortures is to put your prisoner into a giant blender. No blood, all they do is spin spin spin spin spin spin around and flail.

Another torture has one of your Evil Henchmen doing a bad Michael Jackson impersonation at the prisoner, including the Moonwalk, the "I'm Bad" and the 90 degree lean.


Strangely enough, that's when the prisoner screams the loudest.


The voice acting is also wonderful. British accents galore, of course... but for example, Alexis sounds like the typical Bond High Class Villainess, right down to the "Daaaahling"

By default, I love any game where you get to steal the eiffel tower.
The attention to style is staggering: all the menus have silhouette dancing in the background. You know, the trademark of the 60s, and particularly the Connery-era Bond movies. Only these are humorous...for example the Save/Load screen is an underwater scene, with scuba divers doing....synchronized underwater ballet.


I really can't say enough about how much I like EG. Go ahead, buy it! Laugh maniacally.. rule the world!

Rating:
Summary: Fun at first yet....
Review: Fun at first yet the gameplay gets tedious.
Good for around twenty hours. Then you realise your just doing the same thing over and over.

You build your base, someone destroys something, you rebuild it, then agents destroy it again.

Rating:
Summary: Wait for the patch
Review: Fun game, but it has a number of bugs. Most important is one which corrupts the save game files -- your Evil Genius dies instantly on load. No reliable workaround yet. Very frustrating.

Rating:
Summary: Hilarious, detailed, engaging, strategic!!!
Review: I have been playing computer games since Atari and the Commodore 64 so I have seen it all. I rarely give any games such a high score. Evil Genius deserves this high score hands down!
It is detailed, well thought out, clever, humorous, engaging, a long play time of 40 to 60 hours if you savor it and best of all this game has high replayability since it won't be the same the next time you play it!

Go to the official website, check out the screenshots, the high resolution videos of actual gameplay and download the demo to take it for a spin before buying.

The premise -
I typically don't go for SIM games like this. I am very into first person shooters. This game has me totally absorbed.

If you have ever played a SIM game, you will be familiar with this style of play. This game is like Simcity, the SIMS and any hardcore RTS game you have ever played....only this time it was done right!

Your a villain trying to dominate the world. You must build your lair hidden under a mountain on an island. You must manage your resources, gain NOTORIETY to advance but keep your HEAT from your crimes low or you will be constantly invaded by the forces of justice. You build your army of MINIONS(pions), then you must develop their skills so they can evolve into advanced minions. As you grow successful you can add HENCHMEN(super villain assistants) to help you fight SUPERAGENTS of justice. All the while you must steal money to pay for your schemes and building your lair, keeping justice off your back, keeping your minions happy and achieving your mission goals. WHEW!!!

The GOOD -
This game is easily a "40 to 60 hours of play game"...or even longer if you want to drag it out. It is up to you. Eventually you do have to accomplish your missions to advance, get new toys, and get new equipment for your lair.
The level of detail and thought put into this game is amazing! The graphics are sharp and clear. There are humorous little jokes plastered throughout. For example - while interrogating an agent of justice, your minion starts to dance and sing like Michael Jackson! The whole time the agent is pleading for mercy! Too funny! When you get money from a mission, your minions actually carry little cash filled briefcases from the helipad to the lair and deposit it in the vault! Until they finish that procedure, your money is not added to your bank account. It is the little things like this that make the game magical.

You have a wide assortment of missions to perform. Some give you gold, some give you notoriety, some give you valuables(priceless paintings, carpets, vases, statues), others give you people that can help train your men!

You must use your head, read through the manual, the in-game glossary and follow the video tutorials. I spent about 5 or 6 hours getting used to the program on the EASY setting. I then started all over with some experience. It paid off bigtime!

You have so many choices and options that no game will ever go like the last one! Similar in structure...but not a predictable match everytime. VERY NICE, this game has high replayability!

For young adults, the violence and torture scenes are very mild...cute and funny even. Not gory or hardcore. This game is meant to be funny, not taken seriously. One example of torture is putting the spy into a giant food mixer and spinning them around and around until they are so dizzy they forget what their mission was. Harmless.

The GOOD parts of this game go on and on and is too much to list here!

Now for the BAD - Just 2 things
1 - This game is not for young kids because it takes adult level thinking to play this game.

2 - There are some minor bugs that can cause major headaches. A patch has been released that solved the big problems.
However, my personal experience went like this...a mission demands that you build a special room for your evil genius to meet with his evil friends from around the world then you must go out and gather these companions.
I built it and started the mission. I placed this room on the edge of my lair. DUMB! Agents kept tunnelling into it and destroying the room. I destroyed the room and rebuilt it in another spot. A good idea but when I did that, the game would not allow the missions to be accomplished because the room had been moved. A bug of the worst kind! I luckily had a previous saved game from 3 days before. I had to wipe out 3 days worth of play. Not bad but not great either! I lost about 11 hours of play time. If I had not had that previous save, I would have had to start all over again!

My advice, save your game regularly(not quick save)with a good label and keep them! Don't delete them until you know everything is fine. I now keep atleast 25 different saves.


This game is great. A lot of effort and deep thought were put into this game before a single line of game code was written. This game is a role model for other game developers and programmers alike.

As always I recommend you go to the game's official website, check out screenshots, in-game video play, then download the demo to try it before you buy it. See if it is for you.

Good luck!!

Rating:
Summary: HEHE so EVIL
Review: I played the demo and loved it. The hip 70's big band music adds depth to the funky james bond/austin powers surroundings. You play a criminal mastermind and what could be more fun than that? This is a sim game so you have to manage your lair while attempting to accomplish certain specified objectives. There's never a dull moment. This is the sort of game that can envelop and take over your life and turn you into a vegetable sitting there in front of your computer. I can't wait to get it!

Rating:
Summary: Borders on great but has fatal flaw - don't buy it.
Review: I was prepared to give this game a great review just as the others here have. I spent countless hours building up a vast underground base, gaining worldwide noteriety, and getting some good research going. Then, super agent "Mako" walks in and basically just ended the game. I had dealt with other agents but this character walked in as an invincible game entity. He fought and killed all but about 3 of my men (and still had full health), killed (got his 3rd and final life) my last remaining henchman, and destroyed about 50% of my base before I hit the "Exit Game" button. Strategy no longer applied: days worth of game play building this empire was rewarded by having it all ended by some extremely poor game design. As a result, I believe I'll be freeing about 1.3 gigs of hard drive space...

Rating:
Summary: good idea, bad gameplay
Review: The idea behind Evil Genius is much like the idea behind the Dungeon Keeper series: build a base to attract minions and then try to take over the world by crushing the silly forces of good. Unfortunately, the game has way too much micro managing when it comes to the combat system and takes way way too much time. If you liked Dungeon Keeper and Startopia, this game will keep you amused for a few hours before you get fed up and want to strangle your own minions for setting off the bases automated defenses.

Rating:
Summary: Fun, but it also has its headaches
Review: The interface is really badly designed in some ways, despite what a gamespy review said.

Trying to figure it out without the manual is pretty difficult - it in no intuitive. Get used to right clicking a lot and that will help, but it would also be nice if selecting a henchman did not focus on him - it makes it quite hard to send multiple henchmen after a super agent (tough bad guy, er good guy)for example.

It is also difficult at times to realize what to do to progress the plot. Small spoiler: for instance if you don't move to a new island the game never progresses and the attacks get more and more ridiculous with no way to alleiviate them. This can be very frustrating especially as the pathetic vivendi website would not accept my forum registration, has no contact email, and has a broken contact form so there is no way to even complain about it.

There are also some bugs and one time my game was ruined because briefcases got dropped in a way that my minions were too stupid to get into the strongroom so they stopped doing any more work.

Still, the gameplay is extremely addictive and I stayed up til 5am the other night playing it. I found myself evilly laughing quite often as I finally found ways to defeat previously unbeatable enemies, and many of the missions were more hysterically funny ideas than anything in austin powers.

As for the game itself, it has been many years since I found