Game Review: Evil Genius

Are you sick of all those do-good computer games where you slay the bad guys and save the world? Well, why not mix things up a bit? Evil Genius, released in 2004, is a game that turns the genre on its head- you are the criminal mastermind, and with you and your henchmen and minions, you have to achieve world domination.

This game is easy to get the hang of, yet challenging, and the funny characters and witty dialogue will keep you entertained. In the game, you must build an underground lair (don't forget to set up diabolical traps to confuse and kill those pesky forces of justice!) and commit acts of infamy around the world to gain notoriety, influence and money so that when the time comes you can destroy the world. And of course some of those acts of infamy will result in gaining priceless artefacts, which you can use to furnish the rooms and halls of your lair.

As an evil genius, you yourself spend all of your time on the island. Whilst on the island, you can build new rooms for your lair (you get to choose the size, function and location of the rooms), purchase new items for your lair, choose how many minions you want and what their specialty will be and send out your minions into the world to steal money and complete missions.

There are both missions that you need to complete, and optional ones that can gain you additional loot and notoriety. Even if you don't do all of the optional missions, you'll likely find yourself clicking on them just to read the comedic missions such as destroy Nashville to do a "humanitarian" deed for a change and end country music. Be careful though! Too much notoriety and the forces of justice will send super agents to your island to bring you down.

You cannot control the actions of individual minions. You can only specify that you want a task done... the game will choose the minions to do the duty. You can, however control the actions of your evil genius, whose presence gives a morale boost to nearby minions, and your henchmen, who can kill government agents if you tell them to.

Evil Genius is a fun game that can easily keep a player entertained for several hours. It is fun, witty and always changing due to new items being discovered by the scientists and new missions being revealed.

The game is quite linear, with the plot progression and the missions that need to be completed to advance in the game, but the player has the freedom to complete as many (or as few) optional missions as they wish, which can add hours of additional gameplay.

This game is well worth a try, and it's a shame that there was never a sequel. There have been whispers of a sequel for years, but nothing that's caused me to get my hopes up.

There is also a Facebook game based off this PC game.