Evil Genius

Evil Genius marries the kind of evil-centred micromanagement gameplay featured in Dungeon Keeper with an early 60's James Bond style aesthetic, casting you in the role of an Evil Genius, intent on taking over the world, chuckling maniacally all the way. If you've ever wondered how the nascent evil genius becomes the world dominating force that movies love to blow up by the score, then Evil Genius could be the title for you. As a micromanagement/god sim, it makes a fair effort with its source material, although you'll often find yourself bogged down in petty details, and it can lose a bit of charm in its eventual endgame phase.

Evil Geniuses don't come out of nowhere -- there's a lot of planning to do, whether you're killing meddling enemy agents or plotting to steal the Eiffel tower, and it's in this planning that you'll either love or loathe Evil Genius' gameplay model. You'll start off on a remote island in the middle of nowhere, with a mission objective to build your evil base of operations. Once your base is built up to a satisfactory level, you can start recruiting more minions and sending them out into the world to steal more cash -- needed to keep your empire going -- and perform acts of infamy. Acts of infamy are one-off crimes that may or may not be profitable, but help to raise your level of infamy, which determines your place in the world evil genius pecking order. So when you start off, you're more or less just seen as a harmless lunatic, but once you're done, the whole world will tremble at the mere mention of your name -- at least hopefully. The flip side to acts of infamy is that they raise the level of 'heat' you have with the local authorities, and the more heat you have, the more enemy agents will be coming to document your atrocities (you did remember to make time for really classy atrocities, didn't you?) and possibly try to kill you. The despicable sods.

That's where good base design comes in, as you can't entirely rely on your staff of minions to keep you safe, the same way that a poison gas trap or spike pit will. Likewise, you'll want to make sure that you've got all that stolen bullion stored away safely, and that there's no chance that all those tourists who've been "mysteriously disappearing" will escape from their prison cell, where you're using them to train up your minions in the dark arts of torture and espionage.

One thing that Evil Genius does very, very well is explain every aspect of the game's interface and rules, sometimes in excruciating detail. As such, you can sit through the game's tutorial, but even once you've done that, you'll find the game reminding you of how different objects and interfaces work, and what you need to do to maintain order at all times. Evil Genius is a very micromanagement-heavy game, and at times it can become a touch overwhelming and even possibly tiresome, simply because you're juggling the demands of your workers, the need for a bigger freezer cell to store dead bodies in, and the fact that your minions in India failed in their act of infamy -- all at the same time. Conversely, sometimes Evil Genius can be distinctly quiet, as you sit back and wait for buildings to be completed or enemy agents tagged for death to be disposed of. Then again, nobody ever said being an evil genius was going to be easy.

Evil Genius' biggest attraction is without a doubt its 60's influenced visual style, which borrows heavily from both the James Bond and Austin Powers films. While you'll spend most of your base planning time at the maximum zoom distance, if you do zoom in you can watch your minions (you only ever control your Evil Genius and his direct, more powerful henchmen) go about their jobs, whether that's fetching dynamite to blast out new rooms, or capturing nearby tourists for a quick interrogation session. Most of the visuals are quite well animated, and there's a few dark belly laughs to be had just watching events unfold.

Evil Genius does lack balance, however. There are too many moments that are either too quick or too slow, and while it is a game that you'll get better at playing the more you do play it, you'll have to spend a lot of time just twiddling your thumbs waiting for things to happen, especially in the early stages of the game. Likewise, while it's fun researching new items and training up new minions, once you've seen what they can do, the humour and appeal fades rather quickly.

Overall, if you're a fan of micromanagement sims of the Sim City style, you'll probably get a decent amount of enjoyment out of Evil Genius -- but it's not really as open-ended a game as other games of its type, and as such it's not a game you'll be playing for quite as long.

• E-mail this
• Print this
• Share this...
  • del.icio.us
  • digg this
  • Reddit
  • Slashdot
  • StumbleUpon
• beam_from:CNET.com.au beam_text:Evil Genius http://m.cnet.com.au/240002280.htm beam_tags:CNETAU beam_label:Send to my mobile beam_icon:12 beamad_category:20 beamad_placement:2181