World Domination feels like a thing of breezy charm • Eurogamer.net

After a morning with Evil Genius 2, I found out that if I have a bad genius for anything, it’s not economics. I keep crushing my evil economy. I should be sitting in my fortress on the desert island, enjoying the sight of my minions bringing gold into my safe. Instead, I’m immersed in construction – tunnels in the wrong place, rooms with doors that won’t fit, lights go out because I haven’t built enough generators. It’s not a complicated game – it’s all about me. It’s like Grand Designs, but with armed guards ready to get rid of Kevin McCloud as soon as he walks in and starts talking about a composting toilet.

What a beautiful game it is. The current demo version is limited to tutorial, but it’s more than enough time to get your evil operation up and running. The only HQ I can select is the Tropical Island, but it’s perfect for villainy, with a helipad, guards running around, and the arctic tidal swell of a classic Bond soundtrack coming down and out. breeze on headphones. If you’ve played Evil Genius 1, or Dungeon Keeper, or even Theme Hospital, you’ll be right at home. It turns out that being an evil genius is a lot like being a hospital administrator. Build the parts you need to run. Build up power and storage for gold and a place for your minions to practice neck breaking (okay, hospitals don’t need all of those things), then make sure the numbers increase.

Evil Genius 2 – Gameplay with developer comments.

Placing coins and equipping them with items is easy and fun, drag and drop stuff accompanied by pretty industrious animations while your minions bidding. Electricity and everything in between is hassle-free: just build generators and let the evil wiring and infrastructure take care of themselves. Each of the evil geniuses in the game have skills they can use. My guy, a Blofeld if I’ve ever seen one, is able to make people work faster or train faster when he’s nearby. Granted, it’s weird to see an evil genie walking around, as they tend to be the egg-chair-and-fantasy-lap-cat type most of the time. I got used to it though. Ambulatory illness. Maybe the cat is in a pocket? Anyway, pretty soon, forgetting the economic disaster breaks and blackouts, I had all the basic parts I needed and a nice army of bad guys ready to harass the world a bit.

It takes place on a map of the world with considerable charm. Everything in Evil Genius 2 is of considerable charm, most likely because Rebellion is in charge and charm is something this outfit does pretty well. The whole world is laid out before me! I chose to launch my criminal empire in Greenland. Greenland, frankly, has seen it for quite some time. Soon I’m cutting jobs in the bank and undermining governments and everything. It’s a simple trade: time and minions – you don’t get minions back – for the money you earn on each job. The money goes back to your base, where I had to use most of it to run the place. Being an evil genius is a bit of a tough job in the early days.

Everywhere there are signs of things that will complicate this loop. The side stories light up the campaign in interesting ways, just as the side objectives help keep the build interesting. After a while, my lair is infiltrated by enemy agents, who have to be caught and killed by guards, and whose corpses will lower morale, as corpses often do, so I’d better build an incinerator. I need to capture people and interrogate them, so I better build that up too. I want to train people to be scientists and murderers, so I need to focus on that as well. Being an evil genius is a busy job!

What I love most about this game is that, like the idea of ​​an evil genie on a fantasy island somewhere, it’s all a bit of a happy comeback. Despite the beautiful animation and the shiny 3D rocks chiseled as I dig a new room, Evil Genius 2 looks a lot like PC games from the late 1990s. I don’t mean it like a hit at all. Rather the opposite. I love watching these kinds of worlds, with a very busy UI and lots of buttons to click, things to upgrade, research to do, and enemies to fight. I have a criminal network to support, a whole world to conquer. And I need to figure out how to keep the lights on, of course.