by Brian - October 10, 2004

Have you ever wanted to build an underground lair on a remote uninhabited island from which you can devise your devious plans for world domination? How about controlling an armada of minions to do your evil bidding? Well, thanks to VU Games and Elixir Studios you can do just that with their new game Evil Genius.

The same thing we do every night Pinky, try to take over the WORLD!

Evil Genius is like a blend of Dungeon Keeper, The Sims, and an Austin Powers movie. In fact, one of the three Evil Genius� you can choose looks remarkably similar to Dr. Evil. When you first begin the game you pick your Evil Genius. Aside from appearance, the only difference between them is the henchman you start out with. After arriving on your island, you will have to construct a base out of the mountain and begin your quest for world domination.

Taking over the world is no easy task, however. It takes a lot of manpower, money, and patience. You will also have to complete objectives such as stealing some loot, kidnaping a person, or gathering all the world�s crime bosses for a meeting. These objectives are called acts of infamy, and completing these tasks will gain your organization notoriety as well as increasing your �heat� in that area. Heat is very important because the higher heat you have, the more enemies will come to your island looking for incriminating evidence against you, try to destroy critical items in your base, or even try to assassinate you. Furthermore, tourists will occasionally wander around your island into your base. If they make it out alive they will increase your heat in whatever locale they came from. Lucky for you, you have an army of minions, henchman, and traps to defend your lair.

There are three main types of minions in the game besides the very disposable construction workers. There are military minions who are the best units to defend your base besides your henchman. Science minions are used to repair things around the base as well as doing research to unlock new items in your base. Finally, Social minions have a variety of uses. By sending them to regions of the world where your heat is high, they will lower it faster. They can also be used to distract invaders from their mission so that they will forget what they were doing and leave the island, or you can make them work in your hotel to distract the tourists. In order to get more advanced types of these minions you will have to kidnap one on the world domination map and interrogate them. You will then be able to train more of that type as long as you don�t get them all killed. You will also have to keep your minions happy so that they don�t do stupid things like setting off you own traps, dropping dead from exhaustion, or simply quitting. Every minion has five attributes. Health, attention, smarts, loyalty, and endurance. Although you can�t control your minions, you can encourage them to replenish these stats by building certain rooms such as the staff room, which allows them to play games of table tennis, pinball, or have a cool beverage. You can also order your Evil Genius to execute a minion which will increase the loyalty of all minions who witness it.

Henchman are quite different than minions though. The only thing they do around the base is patrol it and kill invaders. They gain experience and special abilities through combat and participating in acts of infamy. Unlike regular minions though, they can be directly controlled, and they can only be killed by Super Agents (regular agents can only knock them out. Every territory in the game has a Super Agent, and they are very powerful, but each one has a weakness that you must discover in order to kill them. If you don�t know their weakness, all you can do is psychologically weaken them or capture them. Be careful trying to capture them though, as they can take out a lot of your minions before falling, and if they knock out a henchman they will lose a life. If they lose all three, they are dead and gone forever. Once captured though, you will have the joy of interrogating and torturing them.

I hope you have a lot of free time

By the end of the game you will be able to build your doomsday device, and purchase a new island if you are tired of the deserted mountain. Getting to the end takes a long time though. As cool as all these things sound, you will be spending most of your time waiting for and watching your minions do things. Simply building a new room can take up to a minute or more because they must first go to the strong room and get a briefcase full of money, then bring that to the boathouse or helicopter pad to purchase dynamite, bring the dynamite to the new area, blow up the rock, and then construct the room. Purchasing items is a similar process. Unless you are very patient, the game can feel like a chore at times.

However, for those of you who are patient, the goofy animations, silly names (Jet Chan happens to be the Asian Super Agent), and torturing victims can be very amusing and fun. Interrogating an agent can be quite hilarious, as your minion sings like Michael Jackson while doing the moonwalk as the agent weeps in terror, or sending them on a ride on the centrifuge, or even experimenting on them with a giant laser are just a few of the devious things you can do to your enemies. Even the characters themselves are humorous. Your construction workers are dressed in bright yellow jump-suits with white helmets who practically tremble when firing their pistols, military minions are suited in bright orange jump-suits, and spin doctors are fat, greasy looking sleeze balls that fight like little girls. The game simply has a lot of style.

Mr. Clean would be proud.

While Evil Genius may not be the greatest looking game out there, it simply oozes with style. From the synchronized scuba divers in the load screen, to the objects and characters themselves, everything fits the comical feel of the game well. All the items are detailed, and look pretty much how you would expect them to look. You must employ the worlds best janitors because all the floors in the game are super shiny and have a cool reflecting effect on everything in the room.

Furthermore, the animations are perfect. Movement is fluid, comical, and people move as you would expect them to. For example, Ninja invaders will slowly creep into your base, and roll over trap triggers while Burglars will tip-toe past cameras.

The only real problem are the character models. Its not their appearance, but most of the models have some jagged edges that are very noticeable when zoomed in.

Queue Evil Laughter

The sound effects in Evil Genius are fantastic, and the music is great as well. Each individual object will make its own sounds, some of which can�t be heard unless you zoom in all the way, and they are comical just like the rest of the game. Your control center panels will make various beeps and buzzes, the giant laser will, well, sound like a giant laser, and your power turbines will whir. Speech in the game is very much like The Sims, because people do not speak a real language. Instead, they speak in a variety of nonsensical syllables that allow you to imagine what they are saying, although in some cases their gestures are pretty suggestive as to what they are saying.

Similarly, the music in Evil Genius fits the menacing mood as well. The in-game serves good to create the atmosphere, but its not spectacular. However, the music in the main menu is a jazzy tune reminicent of the music you would hear in the 60's Bond movies and fits perfectly. I actually return to the main menu sometimes just to listen to it.

Not for everyone, but still good.

Evil Genius certainly isn�t for everyone. Unless you have a lot of free time and patience, you aren�t going to get a lot out of this game. In fact, you will probably become bored of it quickly. If you are like me though, and can stand to wait for things, its definitely worth the purchase. In that case, the game will provide you with hours and hours of fun. The game has a lot of potential for expansion as well so don�t be surprised if you see an expansion pack for Evil Genius next year. I know I�m hoping for one.