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Wait for the patch

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 11 / 17
Date: October 17, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Fun game, but it has a number of bugs. Most important is one which corrupts the save game files -- your Evil Genius dies instantly on load. No reliable workaround yet. Very frustrating.

Evil Genius is possibly the buggiest program since WindowsME

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 8 / 36
Date: February 17, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I got Evil Genius from my local retailer, and it seemed like a unique concept, but to say that it has a few bugs is like saying Michael Jackson is only a a little bit white. It seems to install fine, but when you try to play the game, it restarts my PC.

Ok, so I un-installed it, and tried again only to have same problem. I F-Disk and re-install windows and make sure all of my drivers are up-to-date... try again and still same problem. We were told to "wait for the patch", which we patiently did, but still the same issue. The people who were lucky enough to actually get into the game, found a slew of other bugs.

My local retailer would not take the game back due to the "opened software policy" and the folks over at the Vivendi technical boards act as if they could care less, so I guess I am out $30.

I never thought I'd say this about ANY software.... but this makes Windows ME look like a programming masterpiece. I have since used my Evil Genuis cds as a doggie chew-toy, because that's about all it's good for.

Almost Unplayable

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 9 / 16
Date: March 04, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Living proof that you can go wrong with a classic James Bond Spoof. The style is great, the plot is great, but the problems more than make up for it.

This game is very "Sim" like, fair enough, but it becomes overly Sim like when you have to buy your minions ping pong tables and arcade machines. Thankfully you do not have to build them bathrooms or clean up after them when they forget to go.

The real Sim Imported Weakness is however in the AI. Your minions are incredibly stupid, even your henchman have fairly unresponsive controls and there is no AI override, so when your Sims get stuck in a corner because two of them have contradictory instruction sets, there is absolutely nothing you can do but replace them and redo whatever they were doing.

If there is something you need to do and that requires some of your Sims do something particular, say you need a particular item to be researched by one of your scientists, you can not prioritize this. Essentially, you are going to have to sit there and wait while putting out spot fires with your unresponsive henchmen until one of your Sims randomly decides to do this, which could take many hours.

The controls are simple but highly unresponsive. The most challenging thing about this game, is the amount of time you waste redoing things because your henchmen just stood there like idiots. You can give them an instruction, but the instruction spools and if a lot of other things are going on at once, say four out of five super agents are wrecking your base, there is a good chance that your henchman's instructions will be the very last thing to implement, possibly after a swarm of enemy soldiers have beaten them in to a bloody pulp.

The micro management is a good demonstration of why micro management is a bad idea. You could have hundreds of doors, your enemies can unlock them all at once, you have to relock them one at a time. This is more tedious than anything else. Why pause buttons were invented, but all this pausing just artificially extends the length of the game. Sort of like time spent panning across your Island because even the mini map isn't mini enough to keep an eye on the other three quarters of it.

In short, this game is for control freaks, but as it gives no control, is also a game for masochists. It is a game about world domination but it denies domination of even your own mouse. These are also not the sorts of problems that can be corrected with patches, the problems are intrinsic in the interface.

There is also a problem with the texture mapping becoming corrupted, pretty much every system seems to do it, but they may have assumed you would not often look closely enough at the various agents to care if their skin become randomly wallpapered. you can still tell what they are by the mouse over, but it doesn't improve enjoy ability of the game.

If you really like the genre, you will really want to enjoy this game, but unless you are extremely patient and expect nothing from it, you will be very disappointed. This game will keep you busy, but most of it is just busy work.

Borders on great but has fatal flaw - don't buy it.

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 7 / 16
Date: December 14, 2004
Author: Amazon User

I was prepared to give this game a great review just as the others here have. I spent countless hours building up a vast underground base, gaining worldwide noteriety, and getting some good research going. Then, super agent "Mako" walks in and basically just ended the game. I had dealt with other agents but this character walked in as an invincible game entity. He fought and killed all but about 3 of my men (and still had full health), killed (got his 3rd and final life) my last remaining henchman, and destroyed about 50% of my base before I hit the "Exit Game" button. Strategy no longer applied: days worth of game play building this empire was rewarded by having it all ended by some extremely poor game design. As a result, I believe I'll be freeing about 1.3 gigs of hard drive space...

Management

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 5 / 26
Date: May 28, 2005
Author: Amazon User

This is a brilliant game -- conceptually. The problem is squarely with the owner of the company. Somewhere he/she trusted a core developer. You've got great EVERYTHING, art/concepts, everything except programming. You WANT this game to succeed. But game drags and the problem is in the game core. It's irritating to the extreme trying to do anything. The agents move faster than the mouse and I have a 1.6 Ghz machine! They insist that you buy hardware to make up for their bad game core! We can only hope that the game is bought by another company, dumping the boss and his tech friend, and is rewritten in a form that actually works. Or, of course, if you have a 64 meg graphics card, and whatever else the game needs to make up for it's core failures, then you can enjoy it's genius.

Fun at first yet....

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 4 / 11
Date: February 05, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Fun at first yet the gameplay gets tedious.
Good for around twenty hours. Then you realise your just doing the same thing over and over.

You build your base, someone destroys something, you rebuild it, then agents destroy it again.

good idea, bad gameplay

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 3 / 6
Date: December 14, 2004
Author: Amazon User

The idea behind Evil Genius is much like the idea behind the Dungeon Keeper series: build a base to attract minions and then try to take over the world by crushing the silly forces of good. Unfortunately, the game has way too much micro managing when it comes to the combat system and takes way way too much time. If you liked Dungeon Keeper and Startopia, this game will keep you amused for a few hours before you get fed up and want to strangle your own minions for setting off the bases automated defenses.

Has great highs and bad lows

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 70 / 71
Date: October 15, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Evil Genius is an amazingly addictive strategy game (sort of a Sims game). It has great humor, great graphics, great sound, and lots of great gameplay. Unfortunately it has some moments of really boring gameplay as well as some downright frustration.

In the game you build an evil lair and send your minions around the world doing evil deeds. Meanwhile you raise cash, more minions, build a bigger base, buid traps, and defend your base against the nasty do-gooder agents (ala James Bond) trying to take you down.

Doing all of these things is great fun. Just deciding on your base design is fun and the graphic animations are terrifc so just watching things happen is entertaining. Unfortunately you really need to read between the lines of the goals as well as read the manual a few times (and the online help) to figure out exactly how things work. It is very easy to get stuck in moments where not much is really going on and you can't figure out what you are supposed to do next. It is very easy for the boring moments to go on for hours.

Fortunately the game will easily take you 40 hours or more to complete and you will certainly want to play it at least one more time to incorporate all you learned on your first play.

Overall, Evil Genius is a great mix of strategy and campy humor that will probably keep you playing long into the night. Just don't be surprised if some of those hours are frustrating.

Too Tedious To Be Great, Yet EVIL Manages to Entertain

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: June 28, 2006
Author: Amazon User

[...]

Its not a bad game at all, but just as CNET describes, it takes an awful long time to get going.

It seems to take forever to steal enough money from around the world to build your Evil Fortress...on an island that just isn't big enough.

The other problem is the clicking back and forth between the island, the Minion Management screen, and the World Domination screen.

The sucesss of your plotting and evil deeds are determined by a random program, not by any skill of the player, which is a bummer.

But yet the game is amazingly non-violent, even though the content is violent. Its all done with a sense of humor mixed in with a reverse parody of the James Bond thrillers.

My 12 year-old neighbor is crazy about it and can't wait to put enemies in the giant mixer...when he can afford to buy it. It is delightfully silly...except when you have to wait around stealing money, which consists of placing some of your minions on a country in the world map. Then you wait and watch as your income numbers increase, before your minions disappear(in that country). Ho Hum. That's it...that's the stealing, and the plotting, and the acts of infamy. You do nothing else but place your required minions on the map and sometimes you get to click on the word "GO". That is the down side of the game...and it takes days and hours and days and hours to get enough money to get things going.

The upside of the game is designing your evil base of operations. The booby traps are fun(it is just getting to that point with enough money and infamy). I do agree with CNET that the island is too small, everything you build has to be cramped in to fit.

The musical score is wonderful as well as the creative ideas of what to do with "enemy agents", which is as I mentioned earlier more satirical and campy than violent.

Its a great game for boys who have never played a campaign like "Elder Scrolls" or "Baldur's Gate II".
It is a good learning game.

Girls might get bored with it, I did. mjh

One of my all-time favorite games!

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: December 10, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I absolutely love this game and have played it dozens of times always changing my base designs and placement of traps. If you like the Sean Connery James Bond stuff and Austin Powers movies then you will love this game. Everything is a parody of the 60's Bond films from the animations and the voices of the characters, to the music and the dialog (which always makes me laugh).

The game has a "cartoonish" feel to the graphics and animation which makes it even more fun to play. The violence in the game sounds pretty horrific but it's actually very toned down, yes you get to put the Russian in the mixer but he ends up spinning around and around like a crazy windmill. You "torture" your enemies with Michael Jackson moonwalk impressions and by banging loud cymbals together and your evil genius always comes down to the armory to cackle gleefully over their "suffering". You build traps with laughing gas, piranha tanks, and Do-Not-Press buttons which of course your enemies ALWAYS end up pressing, and don't miss the Venus Man Trap which is my personal favorite. The only violent part that I've had a problem with is when people are set on fire, then they run around screaming while they burn to a crisp. It's a little gruesome so I try to avoid fire traps, I always feel too guilty afterwards.

One thing though, this game is mostly about building and resource management. Yes, you have objectives and Acts Of Infamy to complete but you end up watching the clock and moving your minions around, you're not actively involved in the "action" sequences at all. The majority of your time is spent on micromanaging your minions, building rooms, and placing objects inside. It takes time for things to get going but once you have a simple base set up with equipment and traps set then you can really start having fun.

Note: I highly recommend buying the Prima Evil Genius Strategy Guide with this game. You have a ton of traps, artifacts, and objects and the guide lists everything including all of the henchmen, minions, and enemies available and their strengths and weaknesses. I went through each item and added the size of the objects (2x2 sq., etc.) which strangely enough is not listed in the guide, but It's an enormous help when planning the size and layouts of your rooms.

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