Indulge your inner Bond villain in this complex, huge and hilarious sim-strategy game: they don’t often make ’em like this any more.
Being James Bond would have its perks, but are we the only ones who feel it would be an unacceptably life-threatening and exhausting job? Far better, surely, to be a Bond villain. Sheltering in a cosy lair, indulging your worst character traits and conforming to a raft of megalomaniacal stereotypes sounds like much more fun. Thanks to Evil Genius 2: World Domination, we can now find out precisely how much enjoyment could ensue if you retrained as a Bond villain.
Gamers of a certain age may remember the original Evil Genius, released in 2004. It was the last – and most approachable — game developed by Elixir, the studio fronted by Demis Hassabis – a bona fide (non-evil) genius who subsequently retrained in neurosurgery and now heads up Google’s Artificial Intelligence division. Publisher woes didn’t exactly help its sales figures, but it developed an enduring cult following, and the ever-on-the-ball Rebellion picked up the rights to it.
While it has, naturally, brought the wonders of modern game-technology to bear on the franchise, Rebellion has nevertheless opted to continue with the core structure and principles of the original game, as well as adopting the same tongue-in-cheek tone: Evil Genius 2’s graphics conjure a delightfully 60s-influenced vibe, along with visions of Spy vs Spy cartoons and the credits to the Pink Panther films. And its writing is even funnier than that of the original, constantly poking fun at the sheer ridiculousness of Bond villains and their ilk – backed up by voice-talent including Samantha Bond and the national treasure that is Brian Blessed – and making more than a few nods to the Austin Powers films.
Even if you’re as hard-hearted as a genuine Bond villain, Evil Genius 2 will make you laugh. But that doesn’t mean you should do anything but take it seriously in gameplay terms. It’s huge, fairly complex, quite rigorous and belongs to genre which was once immensely popular but which seemed to have all but disappeared in recent years: the base-building real-time strategy game. Classic exemplars of which include Dungeon Keeper, Startopia and Theme Hospital.
Plenty of hand-holding on offer
Perhaps mindful that the plummeting popularity of such games could be explained by the modern trend towards ever-shortening attention spans and extreme simplicity that took hold when the internet began to dominate people’s lives, Rebellion has deviated from the original game’s blueprint by including a long and very detailed tutorial. That was a wise decision: the tutorial is now sufficiently extensive to give you an intuitive feeling for all the interlocking processes that bubble away beneath the surface, and removes the annoying eventuality of needing to do something crucial but not knowing how, which happened frequently in the original game.
Rebellion has also improved the base-building tools to such an extent that you couldn’t imagine how they could be rendered simpler to use. Technically, Evil Genius 2 is a keyboard and mouse game, but there’s no real need to use the keyboard.
Gameplay-wise, Evil Genius 2 takes place in two distinct areas: your base and the global stage, showing a map of the world split into territories like a Risk or Diplomacy board. As you build the requisite rooms in your base, which bring new abilities and increase the number and variety of your minions, you develop the ability to send those minions onto the global stage.
There, you can establish criminal networks in a certain number of territories (which you can instantly tear down if you need to move to another territory and your quota is full). Those networks let you launch schemes, which can be money-making heists, kidnap operations bringing people with useful skills to your lair, misdirections that reduce the heat applied to your operatives by the local authorities or resource-collection exercises.
Key mechanisms: side stories, intel and research
As your lair takes shape, a number of game mechanics and resources are revealed as being crucial to your progress. You’re invited to launch side stories alongside the main story – each evil genius has their own storyline, and there are four evil geniuses to choose between. Along with the side stories — which bring henchmen (initially disappointingly lacking in uses, until you carry out research that lets you upgrade them), loot and new minion types – the four main stories mesh to give Evil Genius 2 a surprising amount of narrative thrust (with which the first game wasn’t exactly overendowed).
Meanwhile, your base is invaded by an ever-increasing stream of enemy agents, who become more exotic and capable as you progress. Those can be distracted in your casino, or marked for capture or termination by your security minions. In practice, it’s vital to capture as many of them as possible, since they can be tortured, yielding intel, which is Evil Genius 2’s most valuable commodity, as it must be expended to launch the most crucial and ambitious schemes on the global stage.
The other key means of ensuring a smooth and untroubled path towards holding the world to ransom is to make sure that you always have a research project bubbling away. Evil Genius 2 has a huge, multi-branched research tree; you can only research one thing at a time, and each research project takes time to complete. Yet completing as many research projects as possible is vital to give yourself the necessary edge to flourish as you progress through the main and side stories.
The research tree covers a vast number of bases; from developing new traps to take out enemy agents, via enhancing the stats and abilities of your evil genius, henchmen and minions, to adding exotic elements to your lair, such as laser-doors and the ability to add extra storeys to it. It also enables you to greatly enhance your criminal networks on the global stage. For example letting you maintain more criminal networks without having to build extra radio networks, or generating a base level of intel without having to interrogate incoming agents.
Watch out for crisis points
As you work through the storyline and begin to assemble your Doomsday Device, you come up against pivotal points in Evil Genius 2, often at the conclusion of a side-story, or a chapter of the main story. It’s at moments like those that you learn whether you’ve put everything you need to into place – such as whether you’ve sufficiently upgraded your security precautions the first time a super-agent heads to your lair, with a brief to hunt down and eliminate your evil genius, while laying waste to your lair in the process.
At times like those, you are often grateful that Evil Genius 2 is very assiduous with its cloud autosaves – it’s easy to roll things back and address any crucial things you omitted. Such exercises, rather than being a pain, serve to emphasise Evil Genius 2’s enormous replayability. It’s the sort of game in which you’ll develop an obsession with performing the perfect play-through. Meanwhile, each of the four main stories associated with the different evil geniuses prove to be discrete and distinctive. Given that they will also take you 20-plus hours to complete, once you find yourself sucked into Evil Genius 2, it could easily keep you occupied for months.
On top of that, there’s a sandbox mode for those who become obsessed with designing the most fiendish lair, from which all the game’s processes such as invading agents and the need to build certain items to support your criminal networks have been stripped out. Budding architects and interior designers should enjoy that – there’s a whole layer of décor which can be applied to your lair, but which you’re unlikely to tinker with in the main game, given that there are much more important things to take care of. Evil Genius 2 won’t be for everyone: it’s huge, complex and requires a certain level of commitment, and has been designed to challenge your strategic chops and force you to employ brainpower. However, those who like their games to be cerebral yet amusing, tactical, challenging and full of longevity should find it immensely satisfying. Such games are rarely made these days, but Evil Genius 2 makes a near-unarguable case for rectifying that situation.
