$20 Game of the Week: Evil Genius (PC)

While playing this weeks $20 GOTW, I’ve come to realize something. There aren’t nearly enough games that allow you to step into the shoes of a criminal mastermind. Yeah, Grand Theft Auto and Saint’s Row allow me to craft a criminal empire and run a city, but even then I’m just playing as a gangster with a heart of gold. I wanna build a secret island base, chock full of henchmen that will lay their lives down for me on my say so. I wanna send my soldiers out to put in work across the world. I wanna capture, interrogate, and kill civilians and secret agents who snoop around my base. I wanna have a badass second-in-command who swears complete allegiance to me. I wanna instill fear in my workforce by killing one of my more incompetent workers right in front of them, Saddam Hussein style. Thankfully Elixir Studios recognizes the void of villain simulators. In 2004, they released this title, which places players in the wold of an evil genius as they try to achieve world domination.

In Evil Genius, you start out by picking one of three characters, each with their own stats and second-in-command. From there, you build your secret base from the ground up. You have to build your base from within a mountain. You construct various types of rooms, each having their own functions. The barracks allows you to recruit more henchmen, the control room allows you to keep tabs on your targets around the world, and the armory you to provide your henchmen with better weaponry. You unlock more rooms and objects as you go along. When you have enough henchmen to create a strike force, you can send them out into the world to steal gold, plot against your enemies, and complete acts of infamy to gain notoriety. Your goal is to gain %100 notoriety while dealing with the various goodie two-shoe spies that invade your base. Your minions will do things automatically, so you have to keep the place staffed sufficiently enough for things to get done. You can control special henchmen directly, and they have special attacks that they can use against invading spies. You can even control the evil genius, but they can’t directly engage enemies. However, they can kill minions to restore loyalty. You can gain access to new types of minions by interrogating certain prisoners.

Like many simulation games, it can take a while to really get things moving in terms of finance. The only way to gain money is to send minions to steal gold, so I need to make sure to send a decent amount out to make any real profit. You can build hotels to keep tourists busy, but oddly enough, I can’t make revenue off of them. Also, it seems strange that while my avatar can kill his or her own minions, they can’t take on the enemy spies. Building your base can be a bit tricky as well, as the hidden mountain only gives you so much space, so you really have to plan out what you are doing. Besides these small gripes, Evil Genius, like all good simulation games, can be fun and addictive. The art style gives the game a 1960’s spy movie/Austin Powers/James Bond/comic book feel, and who hasn’t wanted to step in the role of a comic book super villain? You can purchase and download Evil Genius from Gog.com for $10. Do check it out, as it’s a great game for a great price.