Evil Genius 2 is quite aptly labelled as a satirical spy-fy lair builder. Originally developed by Elixir Studios in 2004 is now been worked on by Rebellion. The rights being sold in 2009 from the Vivendi catalogue as Blizzard and Activison merged.
With no specific release date set, it currently has a listing release date of 2020 and boy am I looking forward to that. We got a trailer at E3 whilst not showing us any game play it did tell us a lot about the game and what to expect.
Probably the best attempt at an Austin Powers game
For those of you that haven’t played the first one maybe get around to it. I booted it up and surprisingly it still holds strong with great humour and an interesting 60’s style. The game allows you to pick from one of three villains, each with their own bonus stats on your path to world domination. You start off on a simple island and build an evil lair comprised of rooms with different functions such as barracks, comms and security. Then you begin to add traps and resource management to keep your evil work force of minions sustained. And yes the minions are actually people wearing yellow jumpsuits.
I once stole a totem pole – piece by piece
While building your base you need a healthy cash flow and what better way to get cash then to perform acts of infamy as the game calls it. You send out your minions into the world to steal cash and send it back to your base in the form of gold bars. This possibly contributed to my early obsession with money as a kid. Better than the cash though, was when you had a mission where you stole an artifact or artwork, your minions would box it up and put it out to display in your lair as a trophy. Even better still these trophies would increase your minions’ stats when they admired your evil handy work.
Is my hotel on booking.com?
Evil Genius had some amazing mechanics such as dealing with the forces to justice. The more notorious you became the more investigators you would get to your island. These investigators would in turn then send stronger forces to deal with your nefarious schemes. There was 2 ways of dealing with this. The first, build a hotel. Yes, that’s right, a hotel. This hotel acted as cover up for your operation which allowed you to operate on the island. The hotel would keep guests and investigators busy while you were busy taking over the world.
Traps on traps on Traps. Trapception baby!
The second option for dealing with investigators and agents was to fill your base with a series of traps. Sure, you would start of simple with a cage trap that poisons those pesky investigators but then you would move on to something more complex. A fan that blows the enemy into saw blades or a motion sensor which activates a piranha tank. The more complex your trap was the more money you would earn by ensnaring the investigators in. Evil Genius had super agents who a homage to the like of Rambo or Bruce Lee, so to trap one was the highlight of your play through.
If there’s anything I’ve learned from my play through of Evil Genius is that you will always need fire extinguishers handy. Your base at some point will undoubtedly catch on fire. If not stopped your base will burn to a crisp and you’ll have a bunch of burnt up people in yellow jumpsuits which makes it look like a cult gone wrong.
Gender equality in the evil workplace
The developers of Evil Genius 2 have just released a commentary of the trailer where they give us a couple of things to expect from the game. The island you select seems to determine which forces of just you face more frequently. Some returning characters, I assume this means the evil avatars you pick, henchmen and the super agents. I would definitely like to see some new ones added too.
Evil Genius 2 now features male and female minions, yay to equality. Random generation on what those minions and agents will look like. I am sorry to inform you that the piranha tank will be replaced with a shark tank. Finally, the doomsday devices are described as “really cool”. I expect big and disastrous thing from them. Really looking to get my hands on sequel.
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