Space Satan
Arcane
They annoyed me to no end. Because your minions instantly ran to bodybags and ended up dead
I thought Evil Genius was okaaay (?) but still my favorite game in that subgenre is Dungeon Keeper 2
I thought Evil Genius was okaaay (?) but still my favorite game in that subgenre is Dungeon Keeper 2
The major thing that EG has going for it is the persisting base (one island hop does not count). I would kill to get a DK with a persisting dungeon.
PC Gaming Show
6PM UK / 7PM CET / 1PM ET / 10AM PT
It's high time we showed the world our Evil plan. Don't you agree?
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The World Is JUST Enough!
Evil Genius 2 is a satirical spy-fi lair builder, where players take control of an Evil Genius and set their plans for world domination in motion. When it feels this good to be bad, the Forces of Justice don’t stand a chance!
Build your own unique evil lair and cover operation, Train a force of criminal minions, Defendyour Lair from the Forces of Justice, and Dominate the world with a Doomsday Device in this direct sequel to the 2004 cult classic!
Cruel Constructions!
Every villain needs an island lair, so pick your paradise and put your own sinister stamp on it! Shape the internal structure of your hazardous hideaway to fit your play-style, and construct wonderfully wicked devices for your minions to put to use.
Atrocious Anti-Heroes!
Competence isn’t going to cut it when you’re running an evil operation. As you expand and train your minion workforce, you can create new specialists to help further your evil plans! Need something a little more…intimidating? Recruit powerful Henchmen that complement your play style; every mastermind needs a right hand…or several, in fact!
Dastardly Devices!
The Forces of Justice are annoyingly punctual, so supplement your brute force by researching and developing a series of trap networks! Send those do-gooders spinning with a Pinball Bumper, or put the chomp on them with the Venus Spy-Trap. While one trap is good, more is…evil-er. Combo your traps to banish intruders for good!
Nefarious Plots!
Carry out evil schemes to further your plot to build a Doomsday Device and dominate the world! Sell the British Royal Family, Kidnap the Governor of Maine, and literally BAKE ALASKA. With hundreds of potential objectives, variety is the spice of strife.
Sad to see no Shen Yu this time around; he was my favorite by far.
Hopefully at minimum we'll get a killer soundtrack out of this.
Now we wait to see if it lives up to original's phenomenal soundtrack.
Join Rebellion’s Ash Tregay, Ian Pestridge, and Richard Edwards in this exclusive commentary about the recent Evil Genius 2 Reveal Trailer to reveal exclusive insights, features, and gameplay that you won’t find anywhere else.
He who wark, awive!Sad to see no Shen Yu this time around; he was my favorite by far.
True, I picked him almost always.
Hopefully at minimum we'll get a killer soundtrack out of this.
If the original is anything to go by...
Evil Genius 2 is a lair simulator with Two Point Hospital vibes
We checked out an early build of the game at E3 2019.
Evil Genius 2: World Domination was one of the more unusual and interesting games at E3: a sequel to a 15 year-old evil lair-building simulator from a long-defunct developer, made by Rebellion, best known now for the Sniper Elite series. Even in this early state, though, I can see what they're going for: a simulator game that slots into the landscape of Cities Skylines and Two Point Hospital, with a nice cartoon-y art style that crucially swerves clear of looking like a mobile game. It's got a lot of personality and potential, hinted at by the animated trailer above.
Your aim is to build an evil lair, and eventually, a doomsday device to go with it. You build a base, train up henchman, defend your lair from spy types, and aim to conquer the world. Rebellion's goal is capture the first game's feeling—it retains many of the characters, and a similar tone—but to make it appealing to new players. You can choose your playable Evil Genius out of four, and each has their own campaign. Your minions balance vitality, morale, and smarts stats while building new areas in your base. Eventually, you'll send goons out into the wider world to commit 'heinous acts'.
You train capture specialists who can help you brainwash people. You also lay traps throughout your base, as hinted at by the trailer, to help investigators meet their demise: they include a venus spy trap and a giant boxing glove, as well as the fan trap and shark pool shown in the trailer above. All of this looks nastier on paper than it appears in the game, which lands somewhere between No One Lives Forever and Austin Powers in tone. Your base is an island, and you're obliged to have a cover operation—a casino is shown in the demo at E3. Tourists and low level agents will continually arrive by boat throughout the game.
"It was about revisiting every element of the game and deciding, does this still hold up?" says producer Ash Tregay, discussing how Evil Genius 2 builds on the 2004 original. "Are players' expectations different now? How can we improve this? So areas where we've made tweaks would be things like the AI, the most obvious one. In Evil Genius 1, you might be waiting a while for your orders to get obeyed. In Evil Genius 2, we've been very keen to make sure that even though it might take a while for say construction to complete, nonetheless as soon as I hit confirm, go and build this stuff, you can see the reactions of minions who will then start running and carrying out your orders. So that level of feedback has been important."
I ask if the fan base for Evil Genius has continued growing since the game launched 15 years ago. "I don't think it would be truthful to say it's constantly gaining, like this new snowballing effect of players. But we have seen a steady stream of people continue to play and enjoy it on Steam. The Steam forums and subreddit are still active places. I think that the key think about Evil Genius is its ability to retain a fanbase. You've had people who have been continually playing it for 15 years on and off."
While Rebellion itself didn't work on the original, the team is composed of people who want to replicate its unique flavour. "One of the prerequisites for getting on the team for a number of our key members was a knowledge and passion for the original game. So in fact it's the crux of how our lead designer, Rich [Edwards], got his job. I have yet to meet anyone who has the same level of working knowledge of the original game and a real, real passion for it. You should've seen his face when he saw the trailer for the first time. So that's been a key point. And it's also about getting a team together who are really keen to work in this art style. It's obviously quite different for a Rebellion title, and we're keen to get a group of people who really get the fun and the silliness and the satire of the Evil Genius universe."
Studio art lead Ian Pestridge discusses how the look of the original is being built upon in this sequel. "We're trying to capture that character of the visuals and the animation, but then making improvement to the visual language used, to make sure things are more coherent, that you can understand very quickly what you're looking at and what it's supposed to be. It's very much bringing it up to date at the same time."
While this build is early and hands-off, it makes a promising impression. The quality of the characters and animation remind me of something like Two Point Hospital, which the team paid careful attention to. "When Two Point Hospital came up, we took a couple of days and said, 'let's all play this as a team, then get together and discuss what we really like and what we can take forward from this, and what we would like to see the similarities in our own game'. There's a great passion for management games."
Rebellion has owned Evil Genius since 2006, but now, as so many other sim games have found their footing on PC, this has turned out to be the ideal time for a proper follow-up. "I think what we've been saying in general is it's the right time and the right team. The Paradox titles, Frontier, Two Point Hospital last year, there's absolutely a renaissance for this type of title in the marketplace. And yet there still isn't anything quite like Evil Genius out there, which are all good things for us."
Evil Genius 2 is due out in 2020.
Evil Genius 2 wants to feed the sharks, not jump them
This is Maximilian. As you can see, he is a very insecure criminal mastermind. Not content with having a scar on his left eye, he wears a monocle on his right. He is trying very hard to be the stereotype of evil. When you need this many sinister affectations to intimidate your staff, you are probably broadcasting your own neuroses straight to the camera. But maybe this is to be expected of the lead evil-doer in Evil Genius 2: World Domination. After all, Max is basically the slime left behind when you pass multiple Bond villains through the parody mincer. Ash Tregay, producer on the game at Rebellion, seems to know this, even if he is determined to indulge in some moustache-twirling spin of his own.
“He is definitely not Blofeld or Dr Evil,” says Tregay, “because he doesn’t have a cat. Totally different man.”
It’s nice when developers are self-effacing, even if they have probably delivered the same gag to countless other journalists over the past 48 hours. I’m at E3, looking at a hands-off demo of the upcoming anti-spy management game. It’s a base-building manage ‘em up. You click and drag yourself a lair, building corridors here, a guard barracks there. We’re shown a “serum lab”, for instance, and a videogame room where your minions can go to unwind, presumably playing any game as long as it is published by Rebellion.
This all lurks beneath a cover operation – a front, basically. We’re shown a casino running on the tropical island above the lair. The casino is important, and you have to employ valets to convince people in the gambling halls there’s nothing to see behind those mysterious double doors.
“The cover operation is far more integrated in Evil Genius 2,” says Tregay, comparing it to the original Evil Genius of 2004. “It’s not the kind of thing you can ignore, it is your first line of defence against the Forces of Justice.”
Ah, the goodies. This isn’t just a game of minion management and judicious toilet placement, you see. It’s also a defence game of sorts, about keeping secret agents and brave commandos out of your lair. A tycoon of bad guy vigilance. The Forces of Justice are a handful of characters who want to get in and sabotage your lair. To stop them you have to combine traps as a sort of corridor defence. There are bouncy traps, carnivorous plants, big magnets, and giant bubbles like that one from The Prisoner. There’s pleasure in these toys, says Tregay, but also a reason why they are the tools of a cartoon villain.
“It’s to offer you the outlet of: you’re the bad guy, but you don’t need to feel bad about it,” he says, “because it’s ridiculous.”
You can spot goody-two-shoes agents by their behaviour. We’re shown one agent, dressed undercover in one of our minions’ outfits. But she can be spotted easily because she’s running (everyone else is ambling calmly) and wearing a non-uniform shoulder pad. But we soon see her blown down a corridor by a giant fan. She recovers and seems fine, until the floor opens beneath her and she plops helplessly into a shark tank.
“It is definitely a guilty pleasure, isn’t it?” says Ian Pestridge, the game’s art lead who’s also sitting in on the demo. “It’s something everybody wants to do but they don’t want to admit to.”
There are moments, he says, when you watch an agent arrive at the island from a cruise ship, for example, and make their way through your casino.
“You almost want them to succeed,” he says. “Just to see what kind of mess you can make with your trap network.”
But there’s a bit of base-balancing to be done too. A twisting corridor of traps makes things hard for spies, but also cumbersome for your own minions. Making everything easy to reach improves efficiency, I’m told, but makes it easy for agents to get to your generator and blow it up. Exploding your facilities is one of the acts of sabotage the Force of Justice will do to stop you completing the “doomsday device” that will win you the game.
Rebellion are candid about their influences (you probably have to be when it’s based on such obvious parody-fuel as 1960s spy movies) and they talk with quiet respect for Two Point Hospital when showing off their underground lair (more on that in a bit). But most of the game’s attitude clearly comes from its 2004 ancestor. When they show off the prominent henchmen who patrol the corridors of your subterranean baddiebase, they highlight a character called Eli Barracuda Jr. He might be familiar to Evil Genius players, although the “junior” is notable.
“[He] looks remarkably similar,” says Pestridge, “but it is actually just his son”.
Red Ivan is another returning character, who you’ll be able to play as head villain this time, not just a form of muscle. You can control these characters directly, both henchfolk like Junior and your alpha geniuses like Ivan or the bemonocled Maximilian. So there is some direct “click-to-go-here” stuff going on. Although I’m told if your mastermind dies, it’s game over. Max is weak and slow, and should maybe stay away from infiltrating agents. But the strong Ivan can deal with spies himself. Or you could just throw agents in a brainwashing room and send them back to their HQ, convinced there’s nothing to report.
The developers zoom in on the lair and we see some other details. There are grunt minions battering punchbags to build muscle. There are security minions patrolling the hallways. Technician minions keeping machinery from bursting into flames. They all have some meters attached (health, energy, smarts). Basically, they’ll do their jobs for a while, then have to rest or do something recreative to recharge. But your underlings also have flaws. Or “traits” as Tregay puts it.
“The traits system was something we were interested to see in Two Point Hospital because we were already doing something similar, so it was sort of gratifying to see how well that was received. So we were like: ‘Oh cool, yeah, we are doing the right kind of thing, yeah!’”
They can be positive traits. But in the demo’s case we’re shown a minion sitting at a computer in the control room of our lair. He seems to be sleeping on the job. That’s the “lazy” trait. So head genius and grandmaster of neuroses Maximilian calls the minion over for a chat. We’re going to have a “HR conversation”, says Tregay. This mostly involves being hosed down with submachinegun bullets. The lazy minion puffs into a body bag, which is carted away by other, loyal minions. I get the feeling Max’s workforce is not unionised.
“We want to make sure when you do zoom in on those characters in those moments there’s some really good artwork to look at,” says Pestridge. “There’s moment-to-moment humour at looking at a guy falling asleep at his monitor, or watching the martial artists train themselves up… [they’re] not just numbers moving around.”
The demo is over, but I have time to ask the pair some questions. Before I leave, I ask why they wanted to make a sequel of this particular old game. The tycoon and management genres are fond of their throwbacks. But do we really need to revisit this stuff?
It isn’t about revisiting, says Pestridge. It’s more about capturing the “perceived memory” of the game – not the actual game itself. Because going back with a simple remake would not be enough in the case of Evil Genius. And to explain this in the most thematic way possible, he finds inspiration in the words of another villainous overlord.
“Sometimes reality can be very disappointing, as Thanos once said. The opportunity to re-imagine it as a sequel means you can recapture that nostalgia.”
Evil Genius 2 is due out some time in 2020