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Has great highs and bad lows

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 70 / 71
Date: October 15, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Evil Genius is an amazingly addictive strategy game (sort of a Sims game). It has great humor, great graphics, great sound, and lots of great gameplay. Unfortunately it has some moments of really boring gameplay as well as some downright frustration.

In the game you build an evil lair and send your minions around the world doing evil deeds. Meanwhile you raise cash, more minions, build a bigger base, buid traps, and defend your base against the nasty do-gooder agents (ala James Bond) trying to take you down.

Doing all of these things is great fun. Just deciding on your base design is fun and the graphic animations are terrifc so just watching things happen is entertaining. Unfortunately you really need to read between the lines of the goals as well as read the manual a few times (and the online help) to figure out exactly how things work. It is very easy to get stuck in moments where not much is really going on and you can't figure out what you are supposed to do next. It is very easy for the boring moments to go on for hours.

Fortunately the game will easily take you 40 hours or more to complete and you will certainly want to play it at least one more time to incorporate all you learned on your first play.

Overall, Evil Genius is a great mix of strategy and campy humor that will probably keep you playing long into the night. Just don't be surprised if some of those hours are frustrating.

The delight of being evil

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 56 / 60
Date: October 29, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Evil Genius: The game you can't live without if you've ever had the urge to stroke white fluffy cats while speaking in a sinister tone, and own your own Doomsday Device.

You have three choices for your Evil Genius: Alexis, the beautiful heiress whose charm allows her to keep minions loyal far longer than the other two. Maximilliam, a megalomaniac entrepeneur, and Shen Yu the Inescrutable Lord from China.

All of them are, of coure, stereotypes of the typical Bond Villains. Back when James Bond was good and scottish, before a certain cocky englishman hopped into the movies.
You get your typical Piranha tank traps. Beehive traps, laser traps, blade traps, etcetera.

The goal of the game is assembling your Doomsday Device. Of course, near the middle of the game when you get really notorious after you've tampered in the world, you have "Special Agents" coming after you being sent by governments from the five continents. They are tough and hard to beat. But when you capture them and send them for interrogation and/or torture, your Evil Genius automatically walks to the placce of torture and starts laughing and rubbing his or her hands.

Of course, the Special Agent has a high chance of breaking out of the trap.

In fact, it is very hard to kill the Special Agents. But that doesn't make the game unwinnable: Evil does triumph if you are smart enough.
Specially with creating traps that connect. Should one of the poor sods slip, be prepared to laugh at the beautiful chain reaction!

The whole game is great with parody and spoof on Bond-esque.

For example, one of the tortures is to put your prisoner into a giant blender. No blood, all they do is spin spin spin spin spin spin around and flail.

Another torture has one of your Evil Henchmen doing a bad Michael Jackson impersonation at the prisoner, including the Moonwalk, the "I'm Bad" and the 90 degree lean.

Strangely enough, that's when the prisoner screams the loudest.

The voice acting is also wonderful. British accents galore, of course... but for example, Alexis sounds like the typical Bond High Class Villainess, right down to the "Daaaahling"

By default, I love any game where you get to steal the eiffel tower.
The attention to style is staggering: all the menus have silhouette dancing in the background. You know, the trademark of the 60s, and particularly the Connery-era Bond movies. Only these are humorous...for example the Save/Load screen is an underwater scene, with scuba divers doing....synchronized underwater ballet.

I really can't say enough about how much I like EG. Go ahead, buy it! Laugh maniacally.. rule the world!

Been waiting

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 24 / 29
Date: September 02, 2004
Author: Amazon User

I grew up watching James Bond films and though they might not be cinematic masterpieces in general, the esthetic has always sparked my imagination. This same spark comes in the box with Evil Genius.
A mish-mash of 'Dungeon Keeper' and the 'Sims' series, Evil Genius puts you at the helm of a nefarious, cliché (though never boring) plot for world domination. Take on the role of an insane mastermind and recruit the world's most devious criminal leaders to your superior purposes. Cold war era world authorities will try to stop you with their militaries & intelligence agencies while you counter with your legions of loyal lackeys. Setup operations underground on a picturesque island while wearing the guise of a vacation destination. However, if you cause too much noise, and unwelcome guests arrive, give them a true taste of your well-oiled insanity. Lay ingenious connectable traps across your island, torture captives in wickedly humorous ways, or just rub them out and stock the freezer. Extend your reach to all points across the globe with the theft of money, valuable art, landmarks (Eiffel Tower anyone?), and cause general evil mischief as your government moles cover your tracks. In the end when everything is perfect, the world comes under your thumb as your unleash your masterpiece, a doomsday device (which comes in 3 flavors of doom).
Sound is great, with a 60's era original soundtrack, and SFX are so detailed you can zoom in and listen to the whoosh of sliding doors or hear the crackle of ice in the freezer. GFX are smooth and clean, with bright colors, day/night changes, and a 360-degree viewpoint zooming camera. Character animation is flawless and humored, with dozens of comic like animations. The interface is easy to master in minutes and you're provided with a detailed X-Com-like view of your minion's stats and world operations.
I run a 2.4P4 w/1GB RAM and a Nvidia GF4 GFX card. Like I said, it was smooth and clean and anyone with a low-mid range system should have no problem. No Doom 3 upgrade scrambling here ;D

Anyone who likes the James Bond/Austin Powers genre, 60's era quirkiness, and a good RTS, should look seriously at this gem.

The first review ever!!!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 24 / 33
Date: July 30, 2004
Author: Amazon User

The scene: a nondescript tropical island somewhere in the Pacific. A large hotel-casino resort stands here, making for a relaxing vacation spot. Nothing out of the ordinary, right? Nothing at all...except DR. SIN'S EVIL VOLCANO MOUNTAIN LAIR!!! That's right: Beneath all the tourist traps and public facades lies the inner sanctum of a nefarious madman who is bent on ruling the world. Ever wonder what the day-to-day life of a James Bond villian is like? You will now. At it's core, Evil Genius is a real-time strategy?simulation game vaguely akin to something like "The Sims" or "Ghost Master". The big twist here is that you take on the role of a wicked, scheming, criminal mastermind, assuming control over all his associated henchmen, lackeys, facilities, and technology. You start the game with little more than a simple, clandestine "inner sanctum" which eventually grows into an elaborate supervillian lair worthy of Dr. No himself. You can also buy minions, who build all your cool weapons, while soldiers act as gaurds, defending your hideout from bothersome intruders. You can upgrade your minions to take on dozens of different proffesions. There are also 12 different henchmen, who are tough and loyal. You'll be building your lair while tourists are blissfully oblivious to the fact that your extravagent casino resort is little more than a clever front-go about their ignorant lives, putting more cash into your coffers. Much of your fortune will go toward the construction of a doomsday device, which is essentially what brings about your ultimate goal of world domination. As you progress into the game, you'll have to deal with enemy super-agents enroaching on your island, set on ending your wicked ways. Fortunately, you can set traps and torture devices to end their lives. This is a funny and detailed game, as you can tell from this review.

Hilarious, detailed, engaging, strategic!!!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 10 / 11
Date: November 26, 2004
Author: Amazon User

I have been playing computer games since Atari and the Commodore 64 so I have seen it all. I rarely give any games such a high score. Evil Genius deserves this high score hands down!
It is detailed, well thought out, clever, humorous, engaging, a long play time of 40 to 60 hours if you savor it and best of all this game has high replayability since it won't be the same the next time you play it!

Go to the official website, check out the screenshots, the high resolution videos of actual gameplay and download the demo to take it for a spin before buying.

The premise -
I typically don't go for SIM games like this. I am very into first person shooters. This game has me totally absorbed.

If you have ever played a SIM game, you will be familiar with this style of play. This game is like Simcity, the SIMS and any hardcore RTS game you have ever played....only this time it was done right!

Your a villain trying to dominate the world. You must build your lair hidden under a mountain on an island. You must manage your resources, gain NOTORIETY to advance but keep your HEAT from your crimes low or you will be constantly invaded by the forces of justice. You build your army of MINIONS(pions), then you must develop their skills so they can evolve into advanced minions. As you grow successful you can add HENCHMEN(super villain assistants) to help you fight SUPERAGENTS of justice. All the while you must steal money to pay for your schemes and building your lair, keeping justice off your back, keeping your minions happy and achieving your mission goals. WHEW!!!

The GOOD -
This game is easily a "40 to 60 hours of play game"...or even longer if you want to drag it out. It is up to you. Eventually you do have to accomplish your missions to advance, get new toys, and get new equipment for your lair.
The level of detail and thought put into this game is amazing! The graphics are sharp and clear. There are humorous little jokes plastered throughout. For example - while interrogating an agent of justice, your minion starts to dance and sing like Michael Jackson! The whole time the agent is pleading for mercy! Too funny! When you get money from a mission, your minions actually carry little cash filled briefcases from the helipad to the lair and deposit it in the vault! Until they finish that procedure, your money is not added to your bank account. It is the little things like this that make the game magical.

You have a wide assortment of missions to perform. Some give you gold, some give you notoriety, some give you valuables(priceless paintings, carpets, vases, statues), others give you people that can help train your men!

You must use your head, read through the manual, the in-game glossary and follow the video tutorials. I spent about 5 or 6 hours getting used to the program on the EASY setting. I then started all over with some experience. It paid off bigtime!

You have so many choices and options that no game will ever go like the last one! Similar in structure...but not a predictable match everytime. VERY NICE, this game has high replayability!

For young adults, the violence and torture scenes are very mild...cute and funny even. Not gory or hardcore. This game is meant to be funny, not taken seriously. One example of torture is putting the spy into a giant food mixer and spinning them around and around until they are so dizzy they forget what their mission was. Harmless.

The GOOD parts of this game go on and on and is too much to list here!

Now for the BAD - Just 2 things
1 - This game is not for young kids because it takes adult level thinking to play this game.

2 - There are some minor bugs that can cause major headaches. A patch has been released that solved the big problems.
However, my personal experience went like this...a mission demands that you build a special room for your evil genius to meet with his evil friends from around the world then you must go out and gather these companions.
I built it and started the mission. I placed this room on the edge of my lair. DUMB! Agents kept tunnelling into it and destroying the room. I destroyed the room and rebuilt it in another spot. A good idea but when I did that, the game would not allow the missions to be accomplished because the room had been moved. A bug of the worst kind! I luckily had a previous saved game from 3 days before. I had to wipe out 3 days worth of play. Not bad but not great either! I lost about 11 hours of play time. If I had not had that previous save, I would have had to start all over again!

My advice, save your game regularly(not quick save)with a good label and keep them! Don't delete them until you know everything is fine. I now keep atleast 25 different saves.

This game is great. A lot of effort and deep thought were put into this game before a single line of game code was written. This game is a role model for other game developers and programmers alike.

As always I recommend you go to the game's official website, check out screenshots, in-game video play, then download the demo to try it before you buy it. See if it is for you.

Good luck!!

Wait for the patch

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 11 / 17
Date: October 17, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Fun game, but it has a number of bugs. Most important is one which corrupts the save game files -- your Evil Genius dies instantly on load. No reliable workaround yet. Very frustrating.

Fun, but it also has its headaches

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 6 / 7
Date: December 01, 2004
Author: Amazon User

The interface is really badly designed in some ways, despite what a gamespy review said.

Trying to figure it out without the manual is pretty difficult - it in no intuitive. Get used to right clicking a lot and that will help, but it would also be nice if selecting a henchman did not focus on him - it makes it quite hard to send multiple henchmen after a super agent (tough bad guy, er good guy)for example.

It is also difficult at times to realize what to do to progress the plot. Small spoiler: for instance if you don't move to a new island the game never progresses and the attacks get more and more ridiculous with no way to alleiviate them. This can be very frustrating especially as the pathetic vivendi website would not accept my forum registration, has no contact email, and has a broken contact form so there is no way to even complain about it.

There are also some bugs and one time my game was ruined because briefcases got dropped in a way that my minions were too stupid to get into the strongroom so they stopped doing any more work.

Still, the gameplay is extremely addictive and I stayed up til 5am the other night playing it. I found myself evilly laughing quite often as I finally found ways to defeat previously unbeatable enemies, and many of the missions were more hysterically funny ideas than anything in austin powers.

As for the game itself, it has been many years since I found

Almost Unplayable

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 9 / 16
Date: March 04, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Living proof that you can go wrong with a classic James Bond Spoof. The style is great, the plot is great, but the problems more than make up for it.

This game is very "Sim" like, fair enough, but it becomes overly Sim like when you have to buy your minions ping pong tables and arcade machines. Thankfully you do not have to build them bathrooms or clean up after them when they forget to go.

The real Sim Imported Weakness is however in the AI. Your minions are incredibly stupid, even your henchman have fairly unresponsive controls and there is no AI override, so when your Sims get stuck in a corner because two of them have contradictory instruction sets, there is absolutely nothing you can do but replace them and redo whatever they were doing.

If there is something you need to do and that requires some of your Sims do something particular, say you need a particular item to be researched by one of your scientists, you can not prioritize this. Essentially, you are going to have to sit there and wait while putting out spot fires with your unresponsive henchmen until one of your Sims randomly decides to do this, which could take many hours.

The controls are simple but highly unresponsive. The most challenging thing about this game, is the amount of time you waste redoing things because your henchmen just stood there like idiots. You can give them an instruction, but the instruction spools and if a lot of other things are going on at once, say four out of five super agents are wrecking your base, there is a good chance that your henchman's instructions will be the very last thing to implement, possibly after a swarm of enemy soldiers have beaten them in to a bloody pulp.

The micro management is a good demonstration of why micro management is a bad idea. You could have hundreds of doors, your enemies can unlock them all at once, you have to relock them one at a time. This is more tedious than anything else. Why pause buttons were invented, but all this pausing just artificially extends the length of the game. Sort of like time spent panning across your Island because even the mini map isn't mini enough to keep an eye on the other three quarters of it.

In short, this game is for control freaks, but as it gives no control, is also a game for masochists. It is a game about world domination but it denies domination of even your own mouse. These are also not the sorts of problems that can be corrected with patches, the problems are intrinsic in the interface.

There is also a problem with the texture mapping becoming corrupted, pretty much every system seems to do it, but they may have assumed you would not often look closely enough at the various agents to care if their skin become randomly wallpapered. you can still tell what they are by the mouse over, but it doesn't improve enjoy ability of the game.

If you really like the genre, you will really want to enjoy this game, but unless you are extremely patient and expect nothing from it, you will be very disappointed. This game will keep you busy, but most of it is just busy work.

Borders on great but has fatal flaw - don't buy it.

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 7 / 16
Date: December 14, 2004
Author: Amazon User

I was prepared to give this game a great review just as the others here have. I spent countless hours building up a vast underground base, gaining worldwide noteriety, and getting some good research going. Then, super agent "Mako" walks in and basically just ended the game. I had dealt with other agents but this character walked in as an invincible game entity. He fought and killed all but about 3 of my men (and still had full health), killed (got his 3rd and final life) my last remaining henchman, and destroyed about 50% of my base before I hit the "Exit Game" button. Strategy no longer applied: days worth of game play building this empire was rewarded by having it all ended by some extremely poor game design. As a result, I believe I'll be freeing about 1.3 gigs of hard drive space...

Too Tedious To Be Great, Yet EVIL Manages to Entertain

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: June 28, 2006
Author: Amazon User

[...]

Its not a bad game at all, but just as CNET describes, it takes an awful long time to get going.

It seems to take forever to steal enough money from around the world to build your Evil Fortress...on an island that just isn't big enough.

The other problem is the clicking back and forth between the island, the Minion Management screen, and the World Domination screen.

The sucesss of your plotting and evil deeds are determined by a random program, not by any skill of the player, which is a bummer.

But yet the game is amazingly non-violent, even though the content is violent. Its all done with a sense of humor mixed in with a reverse parody of the James Bond thrillers.

My 12 year-old neighbor is crazy about it and can't wait to put enemies in the giant mixer...when he can afford to buy it. It is delightfully silly...except when you have to wait around stealing money, which consists of placing some of your minions on a country in the world map. Then you wait and watch as your income numbers increase, before your minions disappear(in that country). Ho Hum. That's it...that's the stealing, and the plotting, and the acts of infamy. You do nothing else but place your required minions on the map and sometimes you get to click on the word "GO". That is the down side of the game...and it takes days and hours and days and hours to get enough money to get things going.

The upside of the game is designing your evil base of operations. The booby traps are fun(it is just getting to that point with enough money and infamy). I do agree with CNET that the island is too small, everything you build has to be cramped in to fit.

The musical score is wonderful as well as the creative ideas of what to do with "enemy agents", which is as I mentioned earlier more satirical and campy than violent.

Its a great game for boys who have never played a campaign like "Elder Scrolls" or "Baldur's Gate II".
It is a good learning game.

Girls might get bored with it, I did. mjh

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