Evil Genius is a great game full of laughs and small thrills, but its short on extra features.
Evil Genius starts you off by forcing you to choose one of the three deviant commanders the game provides. Each evil genius comes with his or her own henchman, and you can more henchmen are available for hire later on. Henchmen are like your 2nd in commands (think Oddjob or Jaws). There is no option to create your own evil genius, and this could have been a nice option they could have thrown in. Next you are thrown onto a deserted island with a mountain in the middle that you can hollow out and fill it with your base of evil operations. Your ultimate goal is to create a doomsday device and take over the world, but first you have to create a place where your minions can live, train, work, and experiment. If you have played the Dungeon Keeper games, you will get into this game quickly, but others won't find it exactly hard to build the base. The hard part is managing your minions and protecting your base from the ever present do-gooders trying to invade and destroy your evil home. The worst of these are the Special-Agents, which are James Bond like people who are nearly indestructable and will not sleep until your base is nothing but rubble. The game is pretty much as long as you want it to be, as you can spend hours upon hours tinkering with your base and completing many missions. Although, if you want to complete the game, you have to complete the main objectives which are mostly easy to complete. The only problems with the gameplay is the crazy amount of agents that are always walking right through your front doors right behind your minions, and once inside they can cause all sorts of problems, such as stealing your loot or destroying your generators. You begin to question "why should I even make a front door" because your enemies have absolutely NO problem getting in your base when all they got to do is wait for the door to open (which is almost constantly open because of your minions doing their jobs). The AI is sometimes frustrating. There is a lot of waiting (troop training, missions, research, etc.). The Super-Agents WILL NOT LEAVE YOU ALONE. They are nearly constantly outside and inside your base killing you hard trained minions and expensive structures. Even on easy, its extremely frustrating dealing with these agents.
The graphics look great, and even though they look great they don't require an expensive computer to run the game. Everything in the game has a cool function and funny animations when your minions interact with them. The whole look of the game follows the whole James Bond thing. Lots of shiny surfaces and button covered computers with glowing screens and buttons. Great and numerous character models are thrown at you, with dozens of types of agents, investigators, nosey tourists, minions, henchmen, and more. The environments (two different islands) are nice, and the second island is covered in jungle with monkeys running around, which provides a nice atmosphere.
Not much to say about the sound. The music sounds like it could fit right into an old Bond movie. Its great at first, but after hearing the same song over and over, it gets tiresome. They decided to go the Sims route with the voice acting, everyone speaks jibberish, but its not distracting. The sound effects are great. The gunfire sounds great, the computers make all kinds of beeps, and the generators make a pleasing hum.
Once you complete the game, there is a little incentive to do it over again. You will be on the same two islands, and the missions will be the same, but it is unlikely you will have researched all the items in the game in one play through, and there is always a different way to design your base. Other than that, there isn't much to do over again.
Overall, Evil Genius is a great game that is worth at least one play through, if not two. Its not hard to get addicted to the cool atmosphere the game provides, but with no extra features, such as customizable Evil Genius's or player made maps, this game will become tiresome overtime.