»20th March 2007

Evil Genius Review

THIS NEEDS PICTURES TO BREAK UP THE MASSES OF BORING TEXT!!!

I bought Evil Genius a few weeks ago for the princely sum of £4.99. Seeing as I've got nothing better to do, I thought it was high time to review an oldish game people aren't very likely to play and post it up here for you to not read. Enjoy!

04:36 20/03/2007 - This review is from ages ago (certainly before 16th February, I'll have to check), but I've only got round to putting it on here because initially I thought it was too long and whiny. However, I need to fill this site up somehow and 'put Evil Genius review on Cube' had been on my todo list for way too long and was starting to bug me.

Rough Outline Synopsis Super

In Evil Genius you take the role of (you guessed it) an evil genius. This is a James Bond-style evil genius and you have three choices of avatar: a short angry looking Blofeld/Mr. Evil character, a rich and arogant woman (not sure where the inspiration where that one came from) and a Ming the Merciless/Lo Pan-style oriental villain. Your evil genius resides in their secret base on their secret island. From there you must recruit henchmen and minions, build rooms and extend your base and fight secret agents and the forces of justice. Henchmen are your go to guys, in the vein of Oddjob and Jaws, there are numerous henchmen including a Russian ex-General, an evil scientist and a nice old lady. Aside from the evil genius, your Henchmen are the only units you have direct control over, they are very powerful and can only be permanently killed by the most powerful secret agents. Minions take the form of construction workers for building, guards for guarding, scientists for researching and social minions to distract agents and reduce your heat level. There is a world domination screen where you can send your minions on missions in the twelve regions of the world to unlock new minions and rooms and to increase your infamy. Every action you do on the world map generates heat, which attracts agents from the four world powers to scout out your base. Agents sneak around your base looking for suspicious goings on such as weapons racks in guard rooms and body bags of people who wondered into your base before. Once agents have spotted enough suspicious activities, they will try and leave your island to call in enforcement, including saboteurs, burglars and special forces.

I don't expect you to talk, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die!

The most noticeable thing about Evil Genius is its flamboyant style, inspired namely by James Bond, the whole game has a 1970s theme to it. Black people have afros, it's during the Cold War and the colour coded jump suits worn by your minions are straight out of You Only Live Twice. Evil Genius could almost be an Austin Powers game. The graphics are reminscent of cell-shading, with bright colours and few textures, your secret base has a very clean, futuristic (in a 70s way) look to it.
Evil Genius owes a huge debt to Bullfrog, it is practically the same concept as Dungeon Keeper except transplanted from D&D fantasy to 70s spy films, letting you play the bad guy and hide in an underground labyrinth which good guys then try and infiltrate. The base and the various rooms and items you can stash are very reminiscent of Theme Hospital, you can even build a pharmacy! This would be great if only Evil Genius was as good or better than these ancient (yet awesome) games. The game never seems to step up a gear, you notice an idea that was in Dungeon Keeper and Theme Hospital but the game never really matches the original let alone exceed it. The traps you can build around your base to ensnare the invading heroes nosy agents are often set off by your own minions, and minions are often caught in traps even when the agents themselves trigger them. This is at first amusing and sensible but after a while becomes infuriating when your one and only martial artist is caught in the gas trap which the agent himself avoided, meaning you'll have to go and do the recruit a martial artist mission again, which means more heat and more wasted time. The gas traps, which descend a glass box from above to smother whoever is below cannot have trigger plates placed directly underneath them, so all too often, agents set off the trap only for the box to descend harmlessly down in front of them, blocking their progress down the hall until it retracts. After a while, the traps become too dangerous to your own minions and you simply remove them, which is a shame as traps in Dungeon Keeper 2 (which for the record wasn't half as good as the first one) were very satisfying to set up in devious ways.
The AI which controls the minions and agents also seems lacking. Agents can easily be confused by a corridor with several locked doors on and agents have very poor exploration skills once they're in your base. I found that I could adequately defend my base simply by having one long corridor across the mountain in which my base was built, with all the innocent rooms there and all the highly suspicious rooms hidden off down one corridor the agents never seemed interesting in exploring. The agents ability to notice your evil deeds is also lacking, you can often kill or capture agents right under the noses of other agents but they seem not to notice unless the bodies are left long enough for them to catch a photo. If minions are not set to yellow or red alert they will do nothing to stop the actions of agents, which is particularly infuriating if a saboteur manages to sneak into an important room and set explosives. After a mission which generates a lot of heat, your base can be crawling with agents, and there is little you can do unless you want to attract more agents. The game crutially lacks a display of your global heat level. You can see your heat level in a region on the world map, but you cannot see how high it is and how likely more agents are to come, you can get a good guess as to what your heat level is, but something so integral to the game shouldn't be hidden away like that.
A major criticism of the game is also that it is incredibly slow paced, we're talking geologically slow here. To generate income you must deploy minions and henchmen to regions on the world map, then income is generated every 60 seconds. But your minions must first stop whatever they are doing in the base and walk over to the heli-pad to await transport to the region. However, if the helicopter is already moving someone, you'll have to wait for it to come back. Once your men are in a region, money is then deposited in the depot outside your base, but you won't be able to spend the money until one of your minions brings the money to your store, and out of necessity, your store is usually in the bowels of your base, where the loot from missions is out of sight of prying agents. This whole lengthy process takes ages. Things do speed up once your minions have been deployed a while, but in the five minutes whilst you're waiting for the money to come, you have very little to do. Deploying minions to regions for lengthy periods of time is also impractical as heat is slowly accumulated the longer your men are in a region and eventually the law enforcement in that region start knocking off minions in the area. This increased heat also means that more agents from that region will be sent to look around your base. It is frustrating that the only way to get money involves attracting more agents to your base, who are little more than a nuisance so long as you distract them long enough to lose interest and not call in re-enforcements. Another way in which the game is slowed to a crawl is the way in which minions are recruited, unless you pay for a faster rate, one minion wanders into your base every 60 seconds.
Despite the game being called Evil Genius, you don't have much scope to be really evil. You can capture agents, or the tourists who wander your island getting into trouble, and can interrogate them. This serves little purpose other than to provide a loyalty boost to your minons, but you have few powers to summon them into range to be affected by the boost. You can kill the agents who come into your base, but this is usually a bad idea as it only means more agents will come. When people are killed in your base, they are put into body bags which drain the morale of nearby minions, so you have to put them in a freezer or can leave them in a remote part of your base where they will decompose and disappear quicker. There are only two maps in the game and as you can't get that involved in the missions, it's not very satisfying when you have a shrink rayed Eifel Tower in your store. By comparison, Dungeon Keeper gave you a wealth of opportunities to be really evil. The corpses of enemies were a resource which you could use in a variety of ways, let it rot in the graveyard to create vampires? Knock the enemy unconscious and starve them in the prison to create skeletons? Torture them in the torture chamber to convert them to your side or kill them to create ghosts? Evil Genius just doesn't have this level of complexity or depth, which games like this really should have in abundance.
The game does not have an adequate warning system, the game only notifies you of an attack if someone is actually shooting your evil genius, which usually means all your men are dead and you are about to lose (if your evil genius dies, it's back to the save/load screen). You can build a camera system to better alert you, but when even the most minor agents can overcome the doors to your base, the camera system is left alerting you constantly about harmless investigators, who you can't kill, as this will attract more heat, so you'll just have to wait for them to go. The inadequate warnings are most acute when you are busy on the world map and can't see what's going on in your base.
The game is at its slowest in the aftermath of an attack that doesn't go your way. My base was invaded by several groups of special forces because of the heat generated by the majority of my men, who were out doing missions. The special forces tore through my base whilst I was watching my men complete the missions on the world map. I had started ignoring the warnings that agents had infiltrated my base, as there was a constant stream of harmless investigators who were too stupid to explore beyond my corridor with all the innnocent rooms on and who were always setting off my cameras monitoring my innocent corridor. The game does not bother to tell you if your minions are being shot to ribbons by special forces, which is very annoying. I returned from the world map, having ordered my minions to return to the base as my heat level was very high, and I found about twenty special forces guys prowling around my base, they had killed all my men, a saboteur had destroyed my security room, which contained the gun racks. About five minutes later, my men actually stepped off the helicopter, they had to fight the special forces with their bare hands as the saboteurs had destroyed the guns, they were all killed. For the next fifteen minutes, my two henchmen slowly finished off the remaining special forces inbetween being shot unconscious by the special forces. All the while, new investigators were arriving and taking photos of all the bodies, running away and bring in more enforcement. I was becoming very annoyed.
This idiotic cycle carried on for another twenty minutes until I had the low level investigators and enforcers penned into my corridor again. I had no men, and no money. I spent the next two hours slowly building up forces, having to recruit guards to train others again, and losing men on the world map trying to steal money. All because the game doesn't feature the sort of warnings that I expect, the sort of warnings Dungeon Keeper featured. None of it would have happened if the game was paused whilst you were on the world domination map. The game is effectively turn based, everything seeming to take 60 seconds, whilst on the map. Yet all the time your base carries on as normal, WHILST YOU CAN'T SEE IT. This is very frustrating, that last example was an extreme, but all to often, the shit hits the fan whilst I am directing my forces on the world domination map and can't see what's going on in my base.

Conclussion Grenade

Evil Genius is a pretty solid and fun game until it comes to the inevitable comparisons to Dungeon Keeper. The concept of the game is strong, but you never really feel it really grabs the James Bond theme and shakes all the good ideas out of it. The game mechanics don't feel as complex and well thought out as Dungeon Keeper either, the heat system would be very satisfying to manipulate were you able to see what exactly your heat level was. Most of the rooms you build tend to be left empty most of the time, the pharmacy being a particularly useless affair. Interrogation of spies is a pain, as there is no good way to get a significant number of your minions in viewing range of interrogation as the henchmens minion attract ability is particularly weak. Whilst micromanagement is made needlessly arduous, greater problems arise on the world map. It is a great omission that you can't actually control your minions during missions on the world map, what could have been an involved RTS mini-game is lost on the world map, which is little more than a glorified Risk game. In this way, Evil Genius feels half finished, missions shouldn't be there if you have so little control over them. Evil Genius lacks the diversity which Dungeon Keeper's creatures had, the three ranks of each type of minion are little more than more powerful variants of the lower ranks. Recruitment and training of minions is a slow and frustrating process. Losing the last minion on a particular training tree (say if your last guard is killed) is a frustrating hindrance rather than a challenging obstacle. It means you will have to waste more resources on a mission to capture a trainer who you will then have to interrogate (which is not always successful) to allow one of your minions to be promoted. Evil Genius lets you understand why Bond villains always have such a short temper, they have inept minions they have little to no control over, everything takes ages and their secret base makes XP look like a secure system whilst agents swarm all over their secret plans. Being an evil genius is initially quite fun but soon becomes slow and frustrating, it just makes you want to become a hospital administrator or something. I'm glad I didn't pay more than £5 for this game. Alternatively? Play something by Bullfrog.

2/5

Extar, over, out.

I wish Bullfrog still existed.