You won’t find quality imitators of Dungeon Keeper these days with fire. After such a distant Dungeon Keeper 2 , she has many spiritual heirs – Dungeons , F95zone , War for the Overworld and the first part of Evil Genius . The sequel to “Evil Genius” had to wait 17 years. Who would have thought that being angry and rich is a routine.
In general, in the genre of strategies with elements of “base defense”, hopeless stagnation has been reigning for several years already – developers prefer not to experiment, but to focus on more traditional strategies for management amateurs. This is exactly what the creators of Two Point Hospital did three years ago, when they made an updated version of Theme Hospital , but without the lightness and humor characteristic of the original. We remembered all these games for a reason. In a way, Evil Genius 2– a worthy successor to the work of the head physician from the Two Point hospital. But in our case, the main thing is the CEO of a terrorist organization, with the light hand of which dirty tricks of varying severity will occur around the globe. Ideally, our Doctor Evil should, by our own efforts, come to world domination, as the subtitle of the game World Domination says .
Many of you have probably missed Evil Genius and Dungeon Keeper, after all, the games are one and a half, or even two decades old, so this is not surprising. Let’s explain the gameplay on your fingers. Players have the opportunity to control their “mini-us” in the form of a combat unit, from which the henchmen fall into fear. On a multi-tiered island, he must build rooms for villainy, corridors and traps, establish a basic economy, place personnel and establish a command center – the heart of the “dungeon and Eldritch Blast 5e“. We place generators in the command center: the more there are, the more regions on the global map we can use for machinations: operations that allow us to earn money, recruit new allies or destroy unwanted agents. At some point, the region does not withstand this lawlessness, and sends a task force of killers to our tropical paradise.
And here the most interesting thing begins: those agents who survived the streak of traps get in the face from our minions. Then they are dragged into the casemates, tortured and forced to our side. On paper Evil Genius 2looks good: the preserved style of the original 2004, as many as four villains with different characters to choose from and three islands to build the headquarters of evil and the residence of terror. All this is spiced with humor and grotesque, but still comic characters. In theory, all this sounds fun, but in fact the process turns out to be quite routine, and our protagonist is so strong that for most fights it is not even necessary to turn on the island-wide alarm and place dummy guards at checkpoints. On the other hand, the game allows you to adjust the aggressiveness, survivability and regularity of enemies, so on difficulty above “average” real survival begins… Then you have to turn on tactical thinking: carefully choose the regions in which our soldiers will smoke badly, neglect profitable machinations in favor of dirty deals that reduce tension in a particular region.
The list of actions on the global map is limited to standard tasks – steal a scientist, eliminate a powerful enemy, steal a valuable relic. This is all done, in fact, without our participation. The evil overlord simply selects minions who will not return from the task, but are guaranteed to complete it. We obviously have all the information we need: how much money the evil empire will earn, how many minions will not return from the task, how long the process will take. By the way, there are interesting interactions with the regions – they can be destroyed with the help of our nuclear supervillain arsenal. And if you squeeze too much juice from one area, then a blockade will be established in it, in fact, simply limiting the ability to carry out their affairs for a certain period of time.
The main and global problem of Evil Genius 2 is the lack of content. There is simply nowhere to turn around. The main menu will offer a standard mode and a sandbox, which is distinguished by the ban on obtaining achievements and endless money in the bank account. That is, in the sandbox, you can simply rebuild your evil empire without the risk of losing or going bankrupt. There is no campaign or even a chain of missions united by a common goal in the game at all. It actually offers the most basic set from the global map with spontaneously changing goals that are achieved on one of three islands through the efforts of one of four supervillains like in HuniePop2. Hell, even Civilization has added plots and scenarios!
Conclusion:
The lack of a campaign is extremely depressing – the Dungeons or Dungeon Keeper series are remembered largely thanks to them. Even at Two Point Hospital, we were required to consistently develop and improve different hospitals with increasing complexity! The Evil Genius 2 is not even this – we face the usual sandbox style of SimCity , which in 2021 looks poor and not quite appropriate. On the other hand, what could one count on if the developer and publisher, Rebellion Games, has been doing mostly shooters like Sniper Elite and Zombie Army all his life ?
