What do Despicable Me and a James Bond movie have in common? That’s right – super villains who live and die for world domination. They have their own secret base, their own minions, scientists, powerful machinery, and booby traps! Ain’t that thrilling? Imagine having your own lair in a remote part of the world and hatching plans to bend all governments to your will. If so then Evil Genius 2 is the right game for you!

You lack discipline!

Relish in unabashed diabolism as you hire minions and make them carve out an underground base in your paradise island. On the surface, it’s an exquisite casino, a gilded front shrouded in conspiracy and shady valets, because once you get past the ‘Employees Only’ door, the real deal kicks in. An entire lair complete with secret labs, minion training rooms, bunkers, lockers, prison cells, power generators, radio rooms….and your very own inner sanctum to pitch ideas to your investors! Evil Genius 2 is a management sim after all, along the lines of Cities: Skylines and Tycoon games. You’ve to constantly manage an influx of gold (which you use to build stuff), power usage (to run everything), train minions to serve as muscle, scientists, or technicians, keep them in the pink of health by building cafeterias and infirmaries, and obviously, stay alert for uninvited ‘guests’ because they come quite often.

The world is unto you!

You get to choose one out of the four evil geniuses and a perfect location for your secret lair, each with its own perks and weaknesses. The main objective is to build a Doomsday device, which changes depending on your Evil Genius. For example, the money-obsessed Maximillian wants to turn anything it shoots at into gold, evil mastermind Zalika wants to create a device that would reveal the thoughts of everyone on the planet because it will make people “think better thoughts”, and so on. In a game where the main objective is world domination, you’ll be constantly hounded by investigators and ‘Forces of Justice’ who want to thwart your villainy and save the world. Equip your casinos with elaborate distractions to turn them away, or get ready to witness them falling prey to your ‘state-of-the-art security’ – your booby traps.

And perhaps these exaggeratedly comedic traps are the highlight. You can arrange them such that their lethality is combined, like installing spring-loaded boxing gloves and pinball bumpers at an angle so that when triggered it would send the victim bouncing across the corridor right to the next trap, which is a hive of killer bees. Watch these agents helpless suffer and die as they find themselves in a gauntlet of traps where they get frozen, electrocuted, burnt, eaten by a monster, or lose footing on a faux floor into a pool of sharks. It’s like you’re deriving the same sadistic pleasure as that kid from Home Alone. But for all these, you need to do valuable research and that takes some time (even if you fast forward).

Rule the World

On the World’s Stage, you can expand your ‘Criminal Network’ across the continents and dispatch minions to orchestrate heists, reduce ‘heat’ or kidnap special personnel to be bought back to base. The idea is to ensure a constant gold influx without sending every network into cooldown. Because once you perform a heist, the heat increases, and if it gets high enough, then the network is locked down for a while. That said, a lot of shifting back and forth between your base and the world map is required and it gets tedious after a while. You need to constantly check whether your networks are sitting idle or not, whether you need to reduce their heat, while at the same time managing your base. If the heat reaches a precipice, Super Agents arrive initiating a direct attack on your facility.

These Super Agents are your biggest threat. They can steal gold undetected, obliterate minions in one shot, or plant munition in critical areas that can start a raging fire! And the only way to fend them off is sending your base into red alert and throwing every minion at them, which is essentially throwing them into a meat grinder. That’s because a lot of them are going to die for your cause e.g. the fires created by Wrecking Bola (a super agent) can destroy entire rooms killing any minion inside, and a lot of these agents are impervious to traps so your trap gauntlet is already out of action. Pray to god if more than one of these Super Agents arrive because losing minions tend to halt your researches and global criminal expansion till more are hired (and the hiring rate is like only 2 minions per minute).

Get Creative!

Evil Genius 2 also features a sandbox mode that does away with the main quests and restrictions on the economy. You can sit back and design your evil lair as per your liking; move, deconstruct, and reconstruct anything and become the ultimate evil interior decorator as you play around with numerous traps to mercilessly torture your investigators and prison escapees. And perhaps this is where you get some breathing room to glee at each minion’s comedic traits, even though it serves no practical purpose. Some minions “like frogs”, some of them are “pizza fans”. I had one woman who “only buys unicorn-themed products”. The developers know these traits have no purpose because there is also one that describes the minion as “Disposable, utterly useless”.

Aesthetically Villanous

At this point, you might have realized that Evil Genius 2 is rife with humor, which is thanks to its low poly visuals and narrative inspiration drawn from Bond movies (and Despicable Me as well) There’s not a lot of background score but it’s decent at best. As for the performance, despite a hell of a lot of stuff happening on screen, Evil Genius 2 is heavily optimized and I was getting near 60 fps constantly on a Max-Q GTX 1060.

Real Talk

Evil Genius 2 is a great game if you want a relatively casual strategy simulation, but it’s not without its shortcoming – which is the amount of time the game takes to make anything happen on screen, be it completing construction of equipment, completing research, hiring and training minions, etc. And it so happened that I lost track of my objectives midgame because I got so engrossed in managing and switching between the world map and my base. Even my Evil Genius complained, “why can’t I purchase a base and lay back while my minions do the rest?” The game demands a lot of patience on your part. In short, wait for a sale.

Final Review : Not Recommended