Evil Genius [PC]

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Played-for-laughs '60s spy thrillers have been big hits in both the game and movie worlds. Evil Genius applies this colorful theme to a classic genre: the management sim. Build your base, recruit your troops, terrorize the world, and persecute enemy agents. Playing the bad guy is always fun, and there's plenty of opportunity here for creative mischief, but sadly, the game's just not as good as it should have been.

Building your Evil Genius base is reminiscent of past Bullfrog classics like Dungeon Keeper and Theme Hospital. You drag out a blueprint for the size and shape, and then add room components from a list. Thought is necessary to design effective base layouts; you might want to put your vulnerable power generators out of the way, and concentrate less sensitive rooms nearer the entrance.

An evil genius wouldn't be an evil genius without an army of disposable minions. They all come as generic yellow-jumpsuited constructions workers, but can be re-educated to change them into one of nine specialist classes, ranging from sharp-shooting marksmen to smoking-jacket-clad playboys. Each type has its own specific strengths and weaknesses.

None of your minions can ever be controlled directly, instead performing tasks appropriate to their jobs. Technicians roam the base looking for damaged facilities to repair, valets escort disabled enemy agents from the base, and guards patrol the corridors. Your influence on their activities is practically zero; you can specify particular construction efforts as high priority, but that's about it. They'll roam wherever they like, happily stumbling into traps or other dangerous situations. After all, you're the genius, not them.

Economically, Evil Genius is fairly shallow. Money is relatively straightforward to acquire -- by sending minions to prosperous countries to steal -- and is only used for construction, adding base facilities, or if you want to acquire new workers faster than the default (and free) one per minute.

Minions stationed in foreign parts can also embark on missions to subvert enemy powers, steal valuable objects, kidnap useful civilians and so on. Your involvement in them is limited to waiting to find out whether they succeed or fail. Any overseas nefarious activity raises your heat level, which will cause increased surveillance of your island at low levels, and attacks by troops and saboteurs at higher ones.

No enemy agent will be attacked by your minions, or targeted by automatic defenses or traps, unless you've manually tagged them for termination or capture. There's a good reason for this -- you don't necessarily want to draw attention to yourself by leaving incinerated corpses all over the island -- but it means you have to be constantly watching your radar and hunting down infiltrators for attack. All the time... for the whole game!

It's made worse once the intruders start using mysterious tunnels beneath your base to essentially teleport from place to place. With one well-placed bomb (say, in your power plant) you can be crippled. If you've fallen into the perfectly natural trap of concentrating your radar sweeps on your base entrances, you'll be greatly surprised.

The sole single-player campaign, which shifts to a new island about halfway through, is objective-based. You grow your influence and notoriety while gradually assembling the technology and experience to construct a superweapon and hold the world to ransom. It's a long process, and the game loses its way rather in the middle. It improves later, and continues to gather focus and speed towards the rather anticlimactic ending. Hard to think of destroying the world as anticlimactic, but there it is.

Once you're done, that's it -- Evil Genius has no sandbox mode. Without the background of growing your notoriety and constructing your superweapon, there wouldn't be a great deal of point to the game. There is no particular reason why you might want to replay the game, either. Other management-type games offer multiplayer or tightly-focused scenario missions to overcome this problem, but there's nothing like that here.

Aside from the clunky interface, the game looks great. Brightly colored '60s kitsch is everywhere. At times you could almost be playing Monolith's No One Lives Forever, except that the music consists of a few dry orchestral numbers where a more upbeat, funkier score might have worked better. Still, you often find yourself zooming in to enjoy the atmosphere of your lair, and to watch the antics of its inhabitants closely.

Is it funny? Many of the object animations will raise at least a smile the first time you see them. Elixir has extremely talented and imaginative artists, and the frequently hilarious radio broadcasts that signal a successful mission are also worth a mention. But over the course of a game you'll see and hear most of them, and beyond chuckling at a particularly fiendish combination of traps, the laughs will be over.

Overall, Evil Genius is entertaining, but also a missed opportunity. Its heart is in the right place, but all the funny interrogation scenes can't make up for the fact that you're doing the same thing at the end of the game as you were in the beginning. You don't need to be a genius -- evil or otherwise -- to realize that's not a recipe for long-term enjoyment.