If you grew up in the late ’90s or early ’00s, then chances are you have seen the likes of James Bond, or Austin Powers, or come to think of it, even Johnny English, and thought one of two things. Either you’d love to be a secret agent, or, if like me you’ve put a little more thought into things, you probably thought you’d make a fiendish evil villain instead. Gaming has always been great at giving players the opportunity to be a hero for the day, but it’s not all too often that we get the opportunity to rise up as the evil in the adventure and it’s even rarer still that we get our own secret lair from which to do it all. Evil Genius 2 looks to provide just that, however, and much more with its recent arrival, but just how much fun can you have being bad? It turns out quite a lot actually!
If you played the original Evil Genius that came out all the way back in 2004, then its long-awaited sequel, Evil Genius 2 will be treading into territory you’ll be all too familiar with. You see, the story we have on our hands here is another that showcases The Forces of Justice and this time they have returned to take over the world once more.
The game takes place across three distinct islands, with players choosing from four unique geniuses who are looking to inevitably reap the success of world domination. For me, the classic villain and cover star Maximillian was always going to be my genius of choice, but for those wanting a little variety, there are essentially multiple playthroughs available with each genius offering a slightly different playstyle to change up the feel of things each time.
For the most part, Evil Genius 2 plays like a city builder of sorts. Think the Tropico series or Cities: Skylines, throw in a picturesque and rather textbook hidden lair within a mountain landscape and you’ve got the core of Evil Genius 2.
To ensure your reign of terror is successful, however, you’ll need to do a little more than passive-aggressively stroke a cat perched on your lap, and instead fight of the Forces of Justice looking to put a stop to your reign by way of eliminating agents – and often incinerating their bodies afterwards, complete all manner of evil schemes, complete research into new technology, and utilise and grow an army of happy, helpful and loyal minions including the likes of henchmen and evil scientists to do your bidding for you.
Whilst your first intruder kills, or interrogation of a captured invader is always a bit exciting, however, the true joy of Evil Genius 2, comes from the base building. Even within the tutorial level, I found myself lost for hours as slowly, but surely, I followed the guided tasks and built room upon room that fit into my current needs. These needs would often revolve around my minions with places for eating and sleeping both necessary, as well as vital training stations to enable my lair to thrive with specialised minions, whilst rooms built for the purposes of progression included things such as incineration rooms to dispose of bodies, prisons to hold those pesky invading agents, control rooms from which to run the evil operations and cunning schemes, and the vault full of gold bars that fills more as your monetary stocks increase which is always nice to watch.
Unlike the previous entry, Evil Genius 2 also allows for multiple level lairs with research options eventually unlocking choices that allow you to expand outwards, into the harder rock types that can’t be broken down from the start that surround your lair, as well as upwards which adds a very modern Sims-esque feel to things as you begin to look up and down the floors of your construction. Whilst it all sounds positive though, that’s not to say it doesn’t come with a few niggles.
The main one for me was the awkwardness of deleting unwanted objects or rooms. Sure, you can select the dirt option and rebuild a dirt wall should you have stretched a wall or room a little far in planning and then execution, but with games such as the previously mentioned Sims or the various city and park builders all allowing for easy demolition options, it seems Evil Genius 2 is missing a basic option, or rather it’s not half as simple as it should be.
Another niggle is just how hard it is to know what items are going to cause you issues. You see when creating a base within the game, you’ll have certain items you build that creates heat, with more heat raising suspicions of your newly created base and therefore alerting the nosy authorities to your potential criminal activity, but at no point does anything actually tell you how much heat any particular item gives off, leaving you guessing what is causing heat issues rather a proper summary of the effects of each item, whilst any new item will need to be tried and tested due to a lack of description to tell you what it is your new item does for the most part unless they are overly obvious in design such as beds for your minions for example.
Whilst base building will take up a vast amount of your time within Evil Genius 2 the key component to progression comes in the form of schemes. Schemes are essentially side missions which are accessed via the beautifully designed world map, and once here players will take part in all manner of schemes that will see you conduct the abduction of particular characters or steal a specific item/artefact and so on, and it’s little missions like these that help fill things out whilst your base pulls itself along in the background. Of course, you also have your characters narrative to enjoy, and with the game-breaking things down into objective-based goals for every mission, you never feel too overwhelmed or lost in what you are doing, which is refreshing given other games in the genre often fail with this when coming back after several hours.
The overall gameplay experience to this classic evil villain tale is managing your base building and story progression aspects, all whilst ensuring you aren’t distracted from the threats that look to impede and hamper your progression at every opportunity. Much like many other management simulation games, this can become tricky but with easy-to-follow objectives, Evil Genius 2 is much simpler than other games in the genre and although the control setup doesn’t take well to a controller, with keyboard and mouse clearly the way to play, the experience on offer caters to players enough that newcomers could get in on the action without too much hassle, whilst genre veterans can enjoy a more relaxed and stress-free affair.
Of course, should you want to make things even easier, you could always jump into the available sandbox mode, which not only throws unlimited gold your way, but it also unlocks everything from the off, allowing players to instantly jump in and create whatever ideal lair they can imagine without having to worry about unlocking particular items, rooms and so on and whilst I would always much prefer a little challenge to things, it’s not a bad touch if you just want to enjoy everything that the game has to offer straight away.
Besides gameplay, we do of course have the visual and audio side of things and visually Evil Genius 2 is beautiful, it has tons of colour and vibrance and it’s exactly what you’d hope for from any game looking to impress an evil genius on a faraway island. As for the audio, and it must be said the voice work is fantastic, which is the first time I’ve thought any game has nailed a decent voice acting role since the Sniper Elite/Zombie Army series narrator appeared on our consoles – oddly it just so seems that the folks over at Rebellion are the same ones to thank for that very series as well as this impressive release. Now whilst that might not sound like the biggest deal, I’m often one who misses out on audio unless it has a striking reason to pay attention to it, and more than once Evil Genius 2 had me laugh out loud which is one of the few times, I’ve been made to pay attention to a game in recent times.
Conclusion
Overall, Evil Genius 2 is an enjoyable game. Having not played the original I can’t say if it was or wasn’t worth the lengthy wait for this sequel, but as someone who has played his fair share of city builders and management sims, this is certainly no bad effort if you’re looking for something a little more casual, whilst still providing enough to keep you engaged for several hours. With multiple characters, each playthrough has its own twists and never did I feel like things were becoming too much of the same, which is all too frequent in gaming these days. Sure, it may not be quite so taxing for veteran city builders, but it’s certainly a welcome experience on Xbox consoles.
This game was reviewed based on Xbox One review code, using an Xbox Series S|X console. All of the opinions and insights here are subject to that version. Game provided by publisher.
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