Difficulty:

Easy

Time Spent:

20 to 40 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Mixed reactions"

I really want to like evil genius. The Bond-villain style of the game is really fun and funny, and the idea of building your island lair up from scratch has some real appeal to it. But in the end this game simply is far too shallow and repetitive to be enjoyable in the long term.

The art design is charming, and so are the animations and sounds but the meat and potatoes of the gameplay simply loses its appeal far too quickly.

On the plus side, the base building mechanics are solid, and traps are fun, but there is no differentiation between islands, and you are often restricted in size. Research can grant you more expensive but more space efficient versions of existing technology, but deleting old building plans within the confines of limited space and starting over is a real pain.

Minion AI is atrocious, which I suppose is intentional, but it is also lazy developing. your own minions will constantly die in your traps, and minions make no distinction between themselves as far as their role goes. Your ever so valuable third tier minions are just as likely to stumble into the gas pit attempting to kill an intruder in hand to hand combat and die as a plain worker. And I don't even want to start talking about how repetitive the evil missions are.

These are just a sampling of the problems with the game. Overall, I would say it is a fun little game that is not worth more than a couple dollars.