Evil Genius 2

Prepare your curly mustaches and practice your maniacal laugh, because we're about to enter the world of dastardly supervillains in Evil Genius 2. In this game, you pose as a super villain trying to claw your way to the top of villainy. Grow your base, boss around your minions, and perform various schemes throughout the world. Evil Genius 2 provides you with four masterminds to choose from at the start of the game: greedy Maximilian, intimidating Red Ivan, mysterious Emma, and clever Zalika. For my first game, I chose Zalika. You have 3 islands to choose from as a base of operations as well, each with their own potential layout, benefits, and drawbacks.

Your first task upon beginning your career as an evil genius is to create your lair. As you progress through the story line, you unlock many unique tools and upgrades to aid you in this process. Your minions play an important role in your success as an evil genius. At your disposal are various scientists, muscle-bound brutes, and sneaky rogues. Each type of minion not only has a specific job or jobs within your lair, but they are also required to run various schemes on the world stage. It's important to keep your minions paid and relatively content lest you risk them turning against you. During my playthrough, the greatest struggle I had with my lair was maintaining enough funding as well as keeping up power needs. Unlocking better generators and more efficient gold storage through research really helps that struggle. While managing your lair, you will occasionally find agents and investigators attempting to sneak in and muck up your plans. Your muscle minions are great at neutralizing this threat, but the best passive neutralization lies in traps. Have you ever wanted a shark tank to toss your rivals in? How about a swarm of killer bees or an evil robotic puppy? In Evil Genius 2, you have a wealth of traps at your disposal. There's something satisfying in watching an opposing agent get punched by a giant boxing glove trap.

We can’t mention traps without mentioning the means of acquiring them: research. I felt like research is the quickest way to get where I wanted to be, so research-focused Zalika was a perfect choice for me for my first playthrough. In EG2, research is divided into five trees: global operations, lair, minions, traps, and world domination. Each research node unlocks new goodies to aid in your quest for world domination. As you work through the story, you also unlock the aid of henchmen. Henchmen are incredibly useful and their various skills can aid you throughout gameplay. Your main source of income in EG2 lies in schemes. Schemes are missions you send your minions on throughout the world. Through the world stage, you can build networks, send your minions to meddle or make money, and generally cause mayhem. Keep an eye on your heat, though, or you'll lock down that region for a time and be unable to perform schemes. The biggest critique I have of this game lies in the world stage. The world stage screen does a good job of telling you how many networks are idle, but it is not obvious which ones those are. If a scheme is running in a region, there will be a small dot on the region. Unfortunately, this dot blends in sometimes, making a quick visual check of the regions more difficult. Without spoiling, Zalika’s ending was lots of fun. It should be noted that once you finish the last objective, the game does end. Therefore, make sure you’ve achieved all you wanted to achieve before starting that objective. All in all, Evil Genius 2 is a highly addictive, very entertaining game. The story line was lots of fun, the various missions were great, and I enjoyed the banter in each of the cutscenes. I can’t wait to play through this game again!