Evil Genius

"The more you play, the worse it gets."

This game is not so much a case of a good idea executed badly as it is a bad idea executed badly. When you first play this game, you sort of drift along, doing the objectives and committing Acts of Infamy (missions that you send your minions to do), having a bit of fun. However, the more you play, the worse it gets.

The Basics-

In this game, you are an Evil Genius. Or at least, that is what you want to become. You start out as an unknown in the world, and you must commit Acts of Infamy all over the globe to raise your notoriety, while building your base and making sure Agents of the alliances don't mess things up for you. So we have three main, general goals apart from the obligatory written objectives, and I shall now explain why all of them were ridiculous ideas in the first place, and what the makers of this game have done to make them even worse than they should have been. First, let me explain –how– you do all of this. You've got your main screen in the center that you can scroll around, which is the medium through which you orders. You can't control minions directly because Vivendi hates you, so you have to right click on an object an “tag” it. This will make a minion interact with it, whether it is just a piece of furniture that needs moving or an enemy agent that needs killing. Then you have some buttons on the bottom of the screen – minion management, which lets you decide how many maximum minions of each type you should have, research, and world domination which I shall discuss shortly in their very own sections.

Research –

First, you have to hope your scientists randomly decide something is worth researching, which may take a surprisingly long time. Then, you have to randomly pick some machines to research with (you can eliminate bad combinations by paying money) and the item to be researched. Then you wait a couple of hours while your scientists finish researching, and you get a new product. This sounds very interesting, but… it isn't. Don't get me wrong; I love research in most games. I play the University in Alpha Centauri, research absolutely everything I can in most games just because I… like research. But not in this game. In this game, you spend three hours getting something researched, only to get something incredibly useless. Behold! The camouflaged door, that is just as visible as a normal entrance, plus it can (and will) be destroyed by enemy soldier agents. A marvel of modern science – the brainwasher, which restores intelligence faster, so your minions can hurry up and go back to… Well, standing around. There are several minion care upgrades available, all of which are completely useless, since all they do are let them restore their statistics faster. You'll probably need about 15 minions to keep your base operating at maximum capacity, and most of the time you'll have 100 minions, you'll always have enough at full strength to keep your base running perfectly anyway.

World Domination –

Send minions out to commit Acts of Infamy, ranging from clubbing seals and kidnapping maids to stealing the Eiffel Tower (yes, stealing) crashing the stock market. There are several major problems with this. First, you don't actually -do- any of this, you just send minions to the right area and push the “Go” button, and wait for the results. The next problem is that it doesn't matter what you do. Seriously. This is the most blatant flaw in the design – Nothing you do on the world domination screen has any real effect on anything else in the entire game. Melt the ice caps, start fighting between the USA and USSR, start a civil war in China, take over a small island nation and parts of Africa, whatever… All that happens is that you get a short, generic message such as “An unknown evil organization has committed a crime! Nobody knows who did it, but everybody has a theory!”, and your notoriety and “heat” in the area increases. And what does that get you? Well, heat makes more agents show up on your island, which I'll get to in the last point, and notoriety… well, it is supposed to represent your status as an evil organization, but what it really does is make Super Agents show up long before you have the means of dealing with them, and unlocks new missions which also do nothing when you complete them except make even MORE Super Agents show up on your island. It is also used to get money by having your minions steal. Just do this at the start of the game, leave your computer on overnight, and when you wake up you'll have more money than you'll ever need. In summary, the only thing that the world domination map is used for, when all is said and done, is to get literally invincible enemies sent after you.

Efficient Base Design –

So, what about this island? You tell your minions to carve rooms out of the rock of a mountain, and then tell them to place objects around your base. Now, in this game's spiritual ancestor, Dungeon Keeper, you would need to be efficient in your base design, because you needed those trolls constantly churning out traps, and you needed those warlocks researching, and you needed those dark knights training, and you needed them to do it FAST, because there was a rival keeper or Lord on his way to destroy you. In this game, it hardly matters how you construct your base. You can spend hours designing the perfectly efficient base, and then realize that you have just wasted a whole lot of time. Why? Because your minions don't actually do anything. They sit around your base… They completely ignore enemies unless you specifically tell them to, but that is a complaint for the last point. They sometimes train into a different job, but the time spent doing that is negligible and can only be done a maximum of three times per minion, usually less. Other than that, you need about seven or eight minions manning the control room… And with a capacity of 100 minions, this is not a hard thing to maintain no matter how you design your base.

Minions –

They walk around and do stuff. There is one basic type, one base science, military, and social type, one advanced of each type, and two specialized versions of each type of minion. Military minions kill stuff. Science minions do research to unlock new items, which aside from two inventions out of maybe 20 or 30 are completely useless (Look, it's the Multi-Gym! It lets military minions restore their stamina 1.25 times faster, except they never run out anyway! Or how about the lovely Death Cubicle, which lets you kill agents who you imprison in them instantly… Instead of just either killing them or interrogating them (which kills them) in the first place.) Social minions… Err… Well, they can psychologically weaken Super Agents, which is nice. Henchmen can be recruited throughout the course of the game, and are basically super minions that you can control directly. Whoopie, but they still can't kill those damn Super Agents.

Defending Against Agents –

Agents parachute onto your island and stay for a limited time, then leave. If they see anything incriminating, your heat is raised if they leave your island alive. Heat causes more agents and more dangerous types to show up on your island. By “dangerous”, I really mean “annoying”, since nothing in this game is actually very dangerous at all… The designers tried to substitute genuine challenge for an extreme test of how much annoyance the player can stand. Agents do things such as break into your topside shacks and set plastic explosives on the bunk beds you have there… Don't ask me why. Soldier and veteran type agents are the most irritating of the normal agents. They shoot anything they that moves, and sometimes they shoot things that don't move, too. This is not dangerous, as minions can be endlessly replaced, but is annoying as hell. If they are hanging out by the depot outside your base, your idiotic minions will just keep running up to the depot just to get mowed down by the veterans, camping like n00bs in Counterstrike. You could theoretically build sentry guns to protect you, but any agent who sees a sentry gun will automatically try to destroy it… And, this being the shoddy mess of a game that it is, your sentry guns will do nothing unless you specifically tag those agents for termination, which you probably won't since it doesn't give you any kind of warning message (even though it feels compelled to babble useless warnings at you when basically anything else at all happens. “Warning! Not all hotspots are accessible! Warning! Intruder Alert! High Security Door Breached! Warning!”). So unless you babysit your sentry guns, they get destroyed continuously… Which sort of defeats the purpose of having -sentry- guns. You can get camouflaged sentry guns, but those are only marginally less likely to get blown up, since the agents apparently know what they are most of the time anyway.

Super Agents –

Super Agents are like regular agents, only even more annoying. First, they have the capability to kill your henchmen permanently, which happens more often than you would think, given the godlike strength of the super agents (Jet Chan can kill any of my henchman in three or four hits) and the propensity of your henchmen to wander around. Second, and most irritating of all, they CANNOT BE KILLED. So basically, you have to keep them occupied until their time is up, and even then they may decide to stick around just to piss you off. Later in the game, the means to make them go away and never come back becomes available, but in the meantime you have just about decided to commit either homicide or suicide, quite possibly both. One super agent stands above the rest, however – John Steele. This James Bond clone is beyond annoying. First, you are NEVER able to get rid of him, unlike the other super agents. Secondly, he has the most annoying ability in the history of video gaming. He changes the alert level of your base and unlocks all of your doors. Now, this is a perfect example of everything that is wrong with this horrible game. If you pause the game you can fix it all immediately, so it poses no real danger of any kind, but is annoying as hell!

Summary –

In short, this game is terrible. There is no challenge, only frustration, and both the World Domination and base building aspects are absolute farces that have no real effect on each other. Do not buy this game.

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 01/03/05