Evil Genius is a pretty solid game, and despite its shortcomings is definitely worth looking into.
User Rating: 7.8 | Evil Genius PC
Evil Genius will remind many gamers of the Dungeon Keeper series, which turned out to be a love it or hate it affair. While it could be called the same type of game, there are many reasons to love it, despite the few reasons not to. Evil Genius is a pretty solid game, and despite its shortcomings is definitely worth looking into. Evil Genius hands you the key to your own secret volcano lair as an aspiring criminal mastermind in the 60's with world domination on the brain. With a starting amount of cash, you need to get your island base going, and by the time you become very notorious for your evil deeds, you'll usually have a fully-functional base complete with traps, armories, and of course the occasional place for your minions to slack off. In order to construct rooms within your mountain, you need to blow out room shapes with dynamite. This is accomplished very easily by right-clicking on any un-built area, selecting the type of room you'd like to construct, and drawing a blueprint before OK'ing the design and letting your minions get to work. They will run to grab funds from your Strong Room, take it to a helicopter, and order dynamite. They will then come back with the dynamite, set it, and blow the room out. It all works quite smoothly, and is simple to get working. The only gripe with the system is the list of rooms you have to work with, as it gets bigger, gets more difficult to find the room you want to build (this also goes for items). This problem could have been greatly alleviated if the list was two columns wide instead of one. Of course, no villain game would be complete without letting you pick on everyone. When it comes time to perform evil deeds, the world map is the place to be. From the world map you can spring your minions into action, and have them either plot, steal, or hide from various regions of the world. Different types of minions are better for different tasks (construction workers good for nothing particularly). For example, scientific minions are best at plotting and uncovering acts of infamy, which act as small missions that serve one particular purpose: to raise your notoriety. Raising your notoriety is important because it allows you to raise your maximum minion cap, making your force even more powerful. Military minions work well at stealing funds. Stealing from the world map is the only way you will be able to make up for spent funds, so it's important that you always keep minions somewhere stealing. The world map also has sort of a "Risk" feel to it. When plotting or stealing, occasionally the forces of justice from the respective region will pop out and see what's going on. In addition, they'll try and wipe out your minions in the area. Hiding makes sure that they can't do any harm to you, but you also can't steal, perform acts of infamy, or plot while hiding, and hiding automatically shuts off after a set amount of time, reverting back to the previous action you were performing. Acts of infamy are the best ways to raise your notoriety rating, but they also raise your heat. In order to perform an act of infamy, you must first meet the prerequisites, which involve making sure you have the right type of minions in the area. If you meet all the requirements, you may begin the act, and after a short duration (though others can be very long), if all of the minions survived, the act will be completed and your notoriety and heat will rise. Heat rising isn't a good thing, however. The more heat rises with a particular world region, the more military personnel will be dispatched to your island to try and bring your evil genius down. When it comes time to defend your base from the forces of justice, you have a few good choices at your disposal. Firstly, you may use henchmen to fight off the threats. Henchmen are extremely powerful uber-minions that are meant for disrupting the enemies and generally wiping the floor with them. Of course, your construction workers and really anybody except social minions can fight, but construction workers especially die quickly and probably won't fare too well in battle. You can also use a network of traps to keep intruders at bay. Unfortunately in Evil Genius, trap-making is a frustrating and seemingly hopeless task, and you'll find that more of your own minions get caught in them than the enemy. In order to create traps, you first need to construct a button to set the trap off. You then construct traps where you want them. There's everything from wind machines, to sawblades, to pretty hungry fish, and even a "Do Not Press This Button" trap. After setting up your trap design, you will link the buttons to the traps you want them to set off. Unfortunately, a lot of traps feel pretty useless. Gas cage traps, which drop down on the intruder and gas them to death, never work because you can't put buttons underneath them. What normally happens as a result, is they will walk on the button, stand there, the cage will come down, and gas someone else instead. In this respect, traps can be a frustrating waste of time, though as the means to set off traps become more enhanced through research, some of these problems are alleviated, if only a little. The graphics in the game are the star of the show, not in terms of technical achievement, but because they are artistically pleasing to look at. The textures on all of your minions almost has a cel-shaded feel, and the general character style is cartoonish, but not too much so. Floors of most rooms are shiny and reflective, and the characters animate smoothly (and have some good humorous animations for interrogations and leisure activities). The minions are almost like watered-down versions of Sims, each with statistical bars to show their levels of contentment under your employment. Health, endurance, loyalty, smarts, attention, they'll all play some part in what decisions each minion makes during a routine day at the office/armory/missile silo... If these aren't fulfilled, the minions will collapse from exhaustion, become stupid, or in the case of loyalty, abandon your cause or maybe start stealing money from the Strong Room. It's ultimately up to you what happens, since you don't have direct control over any units except your evil genius and henchmen, by building objects for your minions to use to keep happy. Beds will of course let them sleep and regain endurance. A library will let them regain their smarts, and your evil pharmacy will make sure nobody stays wounded long. The game sounds alright, but unfortunately there's nothing special about the soundtrack in-game. The same slow, quiet music is looped over and over, and it can almost make the game experience feel boring. The music in the title screen, loading screen, and options menus are excellent, and it's a wonder why more music of the same type wasn't included while actually playing. Still, a lot of the sound can be humorous, especially in the case of interrogating captured folks who are poking around on your island. Particularly hilarious is when you interrogate someone in the chair, and your minion starts doing Michael Jackson impersonations as the victim moans in displeasure. This sort of humor is sprinkled quite liberally throughout the game, and it really helps everything stay interesting when the game occasionally takes a nosedive into dullsville. Still, with all the items you can unlock with research, it should be quite a while before you get exclusively bored with the game, and if you're a fan of this genre, you might as well give it a shot. 
