Introduction
Today we are going to be super evil and kill the heroes of the story! If you are looking for a game to be evil. Evil Genius 2 is what you are looking for. As you will choose from several evil villains, all these villains have different main stories as they need to construct doomsday weapons to take over the world! You will need to build up your lair and make sure that your minions are working hard!
What did I think before playing Evil Genius 2?
We did not know exactly what to expect when starting Evil Genius 2, we have never played Evil Genius 1, which is a game that released in 2004. We looked up the trailer, and it looked like a lot of fun to create our own lair. Furthermore, we also learned that you have different islands to choose from, but we did not know what this would entail.
The Steam Page
https://store.steampowered.com/app/700600/Evil_Genius_2_World_Domination/
The trailer looks very fun, and it is clear that this is a strategy simulator game where you manage a lair. You also need to conquer the world by building criminal networks, for that you need minions which you also need to train! While you are building your lair, pesky investigators and agents might come looking to kill you! You will need to build traps and train your minions to be guards!
Rating
I rate Evil Genius 2 with an 8.0 before playing.
The general idea looks great, and I hope that building your lair works simple and easy!
Story
All villains follow a story that is a little different, but the general idea of the story remains the same.
The story of each villain starts with being cast out or losing, they use their remaining fund to purchase a private island to build a new evil lair. While all villains have different powers and passives, the idea is the same for all super villains, build a doomsday weapon and take over the world!
Rating
I rate the story of Evil Genius 2 with a 6.0
While there is a lot of potential, the story is kind of lacking and the tutorial is almost 1/4th of the game. There is too much resemblance between each villain in the story. The biggest difference is the different look of the doomsday device.
Gameplay
The tutorial is immense huge and boring, skipping it also skips a lot of the game. Doing the huge tutorial once to learn the game is not a bad thing, but if you want to create a new villain, you will be skipping a huge part of the game! There are many rooms which all have different options and functions. For example, you will need a vault, which you will need to fill with gold stacks! You also require sleeping rooms, dining halls, and a lot more different rooms that you can create!
To get building you need money and minions, while minions will arrive all the time, they can also be trained into special categories. There are three main branches, Science, security and Valet. To earn money, you will need to build a criminal network. As your lair grows on your islands, investigators and agents start to spawn. This is why you might need traps.
This is where the game starts to go down the drain. To stop the agents, you either need a casino or a lot of traps. While low level agents can be distracted, strong agents later in the game cannot. Which means that if you have a cover operation running, this is a casino, they will just stroll through it, right into your lair and kill your villain. This is why you might think to use traps, not only will a lot of your minions die in the traps, most of them will not even activate when strong agents come into your base.
Where saboteurs take down the traps to get past them, super agents and soldier just walk over them without acknowledging them most of them, resulting in your early demise. Guard that you train will be slaughtered by the hundreds, You will need Red Ivan’s ability to increase melee to survive incursion of super soldiers.
Rating
I rate the gameplay of Evil Genius 2 with a 5.0
While the game turns out fun after the long tutorial, once you have six waves of super soldiers, and a few super agents appear at the same time, while also having one spawn in your base that is causing fires, you are doomed. This is the horror that will happen over and over again! We were only able to complete the game with Red Ivan.
Sound and Graphics
Graphics
The graphics are fun, especially the traps if they work on the low tier good guys. There are a lot of different rooms, and they all have different equipment. A lot of the equipment is unlocked through the skill tree. The doomsday weapon firing could have been better, but it looks great, until everything is on fire, you should build a lot of fire extinguishers!
Sound
The music is a lot of fun in the beginning, but speeding up the game, morphs the sound too much. The voice acting is quite some fun, but the side stories have the same dialogue for every villain, which is horrible.
Rating
I rate the sound and graphics of Evil Genius 2 with a 6.0
The graphics are great but the sound is not amazing.
What did I think after playing Evil Genius 2?
While the gameplay is fun with the research team learning new items, this ends quickly as all your traps are useless. The casino is also worthless, as all super soldiers just waltz in and kill you. Even 100 trained guards could not stop the huge wave of soldiers.
The fun quickly ended as we ended up in a loop of death with the soldiers passing through both our casino and traps with ease and them then slaughtering over 100 of our minions. We tried only having a casino and a death maze, but only Red Ivan was able to suppress the huge waves of super soldiers with the guards not dying that often.
Rating
I rate Evil Genius with a 4.0 after playing. We got into a death loop too many times and had to rebuild a death maze in the hope that it would work.
What are my personal thoughts about Evil Genius 2?
My wife and I did have a lot of fun when playing this game, however it gets tiresome quite fast, especially with game mechanics not working as intended.
Rating
My personal Rating of Evil Genius 2 is a 5.0
Last Words
Pros
- Evil Genius has different villains whom all have different abilities and passive skills
- There are different islands that you can choose from, all of them have a different layout
- There are many different rooms that you can build
- You can play side missions to unlock new jobs for your minions
- Your scientists can research a skill tree for new items in your evil lair
- Recruit special henchmen that have special skills
- It is good to be evil
Cons
- It is almost impossible to stop super soldiers as they walk through your traps without activaiting them
- The gameplay mechanics are not working like intended
- You need way to much generators to keep your lair working
- The limit cap for your minions is to low to keep your huge lair running smoothly
- The voice acting for side stories is the same for each villain
You really need a huge amount of generators to make sure that you have enough power in your evil lair! This is only one portion, we have two more floors full of generators!
Final Rating
5.8
Let me know what you think of Evil Genius 2 in the comments!
I hope you enjoyed reading this review, I hope to see you in the next review!
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I should first play one too
I believe that is quite an old game!
interesting game 🙂 and its indeed good to be evil 🙂
lol
Luckily, there are games for that!
I love the power system because there’s something so funny to me about a criminal mastermind building up their lair but then all of the lights turn off because they forgot to pay the power bill 🙂
Whoops, I forgot to pay the bill, busy killing people!
Good idea, terrible execution.
Nice review
Meh, a bit of a letdown. The worst put-off is the dreading tutorial to get you into the game. I once read that the tutorial level needs to be done last and it must be the best level in the game. Otherwise, no matter how good the rest of the game is, the first impression might turn people off before even seeing the rest of it.
The tutorial is extremely long!
Never played Evil Genius but looks fun
Nice and thorough review
Thank you!
Loved the first game, but EG2 simply dumps everything good about it and rather tries to stand out and is terribly executed.. still not a bad game but nothing stands out.
Thanks for the honest review sven!
You are welcome!
Thanks for this honest review! It’s a pity that now my opinion about this game (I haven’t tried it yet) become worse that it was before. But it really happens =)
I thought it was interesting because of the premise, it reminded me of Dungeons but mad scientist version, but after reading that it has so many problems that could have easily been found with a few betatesters I think I better pass for now
Good review 🙂
There should have been more testers!
A wasted opportunity , being the bad guy and building your own lair/dungeon and defending it from the heroes should be way more fun, I still remember the original Dungeon Keeper fondly.
They should have hired some beta testers….
I was waiting for this game, hoped it won’t be worse but better from Evil Genius 1, many reviews are saying that is is otherwise unfortuntely. Could they improve it enough yet or it is a lost case? Thanks for review.