After a morning with Evil Genius 2, I've discovered that if I have an evil genius for anything, it's not economics. I keep crashing my evil economy. I should be sitting in my desert island stronghold enjoying the sight of my minions bringing gold into my vault. Instead I'm deep in construction – tunnels in the wrong place, rooms with doors that won't fit, the lights going out because I haven't built enough generators. This is not a fiddly game – it's all me. It's like Grand Designs, but with armed guards primed to dispose of Kevin McCloud as soon as he arrives and starts talking about composting toilets.
What a lovely game this is. The current demo build is limited to the tutorial, but it's more than enough time to get your evil operation up and running. The only HQ I can select is the tropical island, yet it's perfect for villainy, with a helipad, guards running all over the place, and the arctic tidal swells of a classic Bond soundtrack ebbing and breaking over the headphones. If you've played Evil Genius 1, or Dungeon Keeper, or even Theme Hospital, you'll be right at home. It turns out that being an evil genius is a bit like being a hospital administrator. Build the rooms you need to get running. Build power and storage for gold and a place for your minions to train up on neck-breaking (okay, hospitals do not need all of these things) and then make sure the numbers go up.
Placing rooms and kitting them out with items is nice and simple, drag-and-drop stuff accompanied by lovely industrious animations as your minions do your bidding. Electricity and whatnot is fuss free: just build generators and let the evil cabling and infrastructure take care of itself. Each of the game's evil geniuses has skills that they can use. My guy, a Blofeld if ever I saw one, is able to make people work faster or train faster when he's nearby. Granted, it is weird to see an evil genius actually walking around, since they tend to be of the egg-chair-and-fancy-lap-cat type most of the time. I got used to it though. Ambulatory evil. Maybe the cat is in a pocket? Anyway, pretty soon, forgetting the pauses for economic disaster and power outages, I had all the basic rooms I needed and a nice army of baddies ready to hassle the world a bit.
