While interaction with the rest of the world is limited to the two-dimensional display of the World Domination interface, there are a lot of things running under the hood to make things a lot more interesting than just randomly tossing men all over the place until stuff happens. I’ve already briefly described the game’s “heat” rating, but each faction has a meter which dictates exactly how much disliking it has for your evil empire. Get the heat meter high enough, and the small scouting teams crawling around your island will soon be replaced by large-scale attack squadrons and super-agents that don’t take crap from anybody, and won’t hesitate to open fire on your equipment and minions if they feel even the slightest bit threatened. A faction’s heat level is increased both by sending minions to an island, and by ordering them to carry out your evil bidding. The more minions crammed into a faction’s area of influence, the more heat will be generated. Once in position, there are three passive orders that can be issued: “Plotting”, which will cause your minions to crawl around the area and try to uncover any acts of infamy (missions, effectively) that can be performed, “Stealing”, which will start cause your minions to start robbing banks and redistributing funds into your coffers every sixty seconds at a rate depending on the exact continent and number of minions currently deployed, and “Hiding”, which ceases all operations, and can be used to evade any super-agents or forces of justice that appear to try and knock your men off. Deployed troops show up resembling stacks of game pieces on the world map, with each representing a specific minion. If a minion “dies” while in the field, his relevant piece is toppled over and vanishes, which can actually appear somewhat gruesome when a whole bunch are knocked off at the same time.

Surprisingly, there’s quite a bit of strategy involved in manipulating the World Domination screen. Different minions all have different ratings in how capable they are in the fields of robbing banks, discovering new and twisted acts of infamy in a region, and general defensive strength, and some also have special capabilities, such as how dispatching a horde of Valets to go with your task force will grossly lower the heat they generate in the field, and various science minions will help decrease the time it takes to carry out a mission. Missions themselves are carried out by first having your minions plot enough to come up with a crazy scheme (like altering the IFF codes on a country’s missile defense system to help spark up the chances of a war breaking out, or sabotaging a new sonar station by feeding sonar-reflective food to all the nearby fish), and then dispatching the minions required in the indicated mission briefing, which can be found by clicking the relevant icon that appears on a given continent. Once the troops have arrived, zooming in on the mission icon again and clicking the “go” button will start the mission, during which your minions will slowly take casualties based on a random factor associated with a mission’s “risk” rating - although losses can be minimized by a little if the right minions are sent along as support for a job. After the time period expires, the mission will succeed (or fail, if all of your men are knocked off), and a brief radio report will play as the local news networks spread word of your nefarious deeds. Rewards for succeeding with a mission can vary (some give special objects and loot to show off, others are for kidnapping, as mentioned earlier), but ultimately each mission will result in an increase in the all-important “notoriety” rating, which is essential for moving up in the criminal world and increasing your maximum minion count to an eventual total of one hundred. But it’s certainly a long and bumpy road, and with the heat scale constantly looming over your head, it’s a tough challenge to try and carry out jobs and maintain cashflow without generating too much heat and prompting the wrecking squads to arrive.

Another intricate part of the game is minion management, or “the art of keeping the pathetic mongrels in line so they don’t steal your valuables and head for the nearest exit”. Minions, henchmen, and justice forces all have five stat bars to worry about, which affect their level of performance and generally inspire bad things to happen once they reach zero. Health, naturally, is an important factor in any minion’s existence, so having a health rating drop to zero obviously results in instant retirement. Loyalty determines how much abuse a minion is willing to put up with, and any minion with a low loyalty rating will generally quit on the spot – often after making a casual stop at your strong-room to “borrow” a bar of gold. The only ways to increase loyalty are to plant loot you’ve stolen around high-traffic areas of your lair (careful, someone might steal them back), have the minion torture somebody, or just order your evil genius to get up and execute the insolent bastard in clear sight of everybody else. Moving on, attention and smarts generally determine how capable your minions are at performing tasks, and letting these values drop to zero will transform them into vegetables incapable of doing anything but standing there drooling like an imbecile. “Damaging” these two factors however is the only non-violent way to try and coax an enemy agent into leaving your island (well, damaging their loyalty will distract them too, but this is tough to achieve), and is something that social minions specialize in. Finally, endurance will cause your minions to collapse once it hits zero, and is also what gets damaged when an order is issued to try and capture somebody.

To properly keep these stats stable and ensure no riots break out, many facilities are available for purchase. The barracks provides a basic place for minions to sleep once night rolls around (yes, the game has day/night cycles, though I was disappointed at the lack of weather effects), and can also contain lockers, which help to slightly increase available minion capacity. Basic leisure facilities, including a mess hall and break room are also available to keep minions at their peak, but as the game goes on, more and more important rooms are unlocked to expand your evil operations with. The armory, for example, is where all your minions will run to arm themselves with some extra firepower when you signal a yellow or red alert through the game interface, and also acts as a security control center once the appropriate objects are ordered, as well as a brig and central interrogation room. Power rooms become absolutely essential as the base expands to keep everything running – just be careful if you decide to cram fifty nuclear reactors into a tiny little compartment once they become available. There are many other rooms also available, but you’ll just have to discover them for yourself.

Given how, apart from henchmen and your chosen criminal mastermind, the game revolves around an entirely “hands off” method of control, good AI is critical to having a fun experience. Fortunately, the AI in Evil Genius seems to hold up very well, but once put under a bit of pressure, I began to notice some gaps in the performance. Minions will automatically go about their business as necessary in the base, with available personnel carrying out their relevant tasks as necessary – Valets will distract any units that have been “tagged” for psychological weakening, technicians will wander around fixing things as necessary, scientists will take samples from a given object and return them to the research laboratory (if one is available) and start performing their crazy experiments, and so on. However, when it came time for a pointed offensive, things got a little hairy. During larger-scale enemy invasions, I would mark multiple enemy troops for termination or capture (minions will ignore unmarked units unless threatened), only to find a general lack of response until they were right in front of my lair’s secret entrance.

A little further research determined that building security cameras and having them linked to a staffed security center would help this, but I still commonly ended up with situations where I’d have enemies actually burrowing into certain rooms right up from under the floor (a nasty trick justice forces tend to pull early on in the game), and then start beating the crap out of my equipment, such as my all-important power generators. Each and every time an enemy agent popped up in my generator room, I’d instantly mark him for capture, but none of my minions would ever come over to deal with the situation until the fiendish soldier got sick of plunging my base into repeated blackouts and wandered out through the security door into my lair’s main corridor, where everybody suddenly decided to notice him. Even installing a security camera in the generator room didn’t fix this problem, and I was left rather infuriated by it. That said, aside from a few other occasional hitches (queuing up a whole bunch of minions to be sent out on a mission at once might have some funny effects and will cause them to literally drop everything and run out of the base, even if they’re busy escorting an incredibly dangerous prisoner who won’t hesitate to steal the opportunity to escape, plant explosives, and blow half your base up), the AI still held up very well, and I was satisfied at how nicely my units tended to take care of themselves. I just wish the enemy response time was a bit better.

I know it seems like I’ve done nothing but describe the basic gameplay concepts behind Evil Genius in a manner more befitting a preview (not an altogether bad thing, given how we lack a physical preview of the game on the site anyways), but I feel it necessary to truly appreciate the perverted amounts of fun this game can be. With so many different rooms to set up and build, it’s a really cool challenge trying to make the most of the subterranean base you are attempting to create, and thanks to the fact that there’s basically an infinite amount of cash available to exploit in the world, and that a heat rating, no matter how bad, will always die down, players are effectively able to progress at whatever pace they see fit. This is as much a sandbox game as that of a world domination simulator, and a really cool one at that. Never mind the hilarious moments – assaulting an enemy patrol with my army of Valet minions to daze and confuse them as they lay on the shoe-shining and dusting tactics on the elite, highly-trained enemy soldiers is one thing, but effortlessly capturing them once their attention level hits zero, then torturing them with the blending machine in the mess hall or my stolen centrifugal force generator in the research lab offers nearly side-splitting hilarity. The interface is also, once again, incredibly friendly, and getting some thorough background information on exactly how a given object or unit works is just a couple of clicks away. I don’t see nearly enough classical games like this in the modern gaming era, and I’m relieved to know that I’m apparently not the only one out there who still has fond memories of the Dungeon Keeper series. If I had one big complaint to issue about this game, it’s only that there is a complete and total lack of sharks with laser beams attached to their heads in the game (although one of the research devices that can be constructed is a “Frikken Laser”), and I sincerely hope this problem is rectified in the expansion pack / add-on that was hinted as a future possibility in a recent interview.

On the ever-popular subject of graphical presentation, Evil Genius presents a nice, clean appearance. You won’t find any kind of card-melting implementations of pixel shaders or bloom effects in this game, nor models that range in the million-poly group, I’ll give you that – but what you will find is a nice, clean game with impressive levels of detail, some excellent animations, and a scalable graphics system that makes the game even playable on an antiquated P3/800mhz with a GeForce 3. Don’t take that to assume the game looks inferior by any standards though – thanks to superb animating and great modeling talent on behalf of the game’s art team, Evil Genius manages to pull off a surprisingly detailed and convincing appearance, and I honestly had no reason to complain in the slightest about the fact that the game focuses more on functionality over flashiness. Watching minions running around carrying out build orders, training each other to new ranks, or just generally interacting with each other is really neat, and the torture animations (as mentioned above) can be really hilarious. The game doesn’t exactly take itself too seriously and has a very bright, cheerful kind of feeling to it, but don’t take that to mean that the game has been toned down for a younger audience or anything – each time I ordered my evil genius, Shen Yu to execute a minion by calling him over and stabbing him in the face with a jagged blade, I was gruesomely reminded of the game’s total focus on sadistic acts of evil and world domination. If anything, I’d place the overall mood as being similar to that of the No One Lives Forever series – just dark enough to keep you immersed in the story and action, but funny enough that you can’t help but sit back and laugh at regular intervals, alleviating a lot of the tension and occasional frustration.

Sadly, not all is perfect with the game’s engine. While I personally never ran into serious problems, reports have been flying around of some major crash problems that can sometimes occur as a side effect of the game’s auto-save feature that may sometimes result in the loss of minutes, if not hours of work – some players even claim that these crashes result in a subsequent chain of instability that can’t be resolved unless a totally new game is started. I also witnessed a few occasional bugs with minions getting stuck in a certain animation – my guards in particular sometimes had trouble putting enemy soldiers into holding cells, as the offending unit would simply stand there while my minion kicked him in the ass over and over again to no avail until I simply ordered the moron to be executed. Finally, in a major snafu, I recently heard a report that one of the game’s more useful (and fiendish) traps, a camouflaged sentry gun was included properly in the UK version of the game, but was somehow mysteriously cut from the US release (in the sense that a bug is preventing it from being researched). Woops? I’d expect this to be fixed in a patch shortly however, along with the other major issues.

There is so much to Evil Genius that the game is just a multitude of awesomeness from start to finish. Due to the relatively slow pacing and sheer amount of stuff to play with, the game is not only incredibly addictive, but also offers a huge amount of playtime. The campaign can drag on literally for days if you take your time and explore everything, and by the time you reach your eventual goal of moving into a new island and setting up the ultimate doomsday weapon, you’ll end up with the satisfying impression that this game was well worth the investment, even with a lack of multiplayer support (which may end up coming out in a future add-on). Despite a few nagging bugs and some potentially frustrating difficulty spikes for the careless player that lets his heat rating get too high (the super-agent that hacks into your base and resets all the doors to the lowest security rating is incredibly irritating), Evil Genius is, overall, one of the most addictive, amazing, and even hilarious games I’ve seen come out on this quarter of the year. Bullfrog might be dead, and Dungeon Keeper might be dead, but the creative concepts they inspired clearly are not. Just be wary of picking up Evil Genius if you have some actual work that needs to be done, because this game will not let you pull away until it’s already several hours too late. Seriously.