Picked this up like a vulture picking apart a corpse when it went on sale all inclusive for $2. I just finished a play through of the first one before installing this one to get it up and running.

What I found, playing this is a functional game, it runs consistently, it has a set of established rules it follows, performance appears consistent. Standing alone, this would be a functional game that isn't quite for me. But seeing as though, this is a sequel, I cannot recommend it.

The game captures some of the charm and quirk from the original title, and borrows a decent amount of the art style from the previous game. There is a decent amount of carry over with the characters, some callbacks to the original, and it appears that there is at least a few team members that wanted to do a decent job.

Where this mainly falls off a cliff is the level of complexity that this game is trying to capture, almost like this was a simulation game, rather than the fun arcade like experience that the first one was. Now, 20 years ago, preteen/teen me didn't think about actually managing the minions, or thinking about the heat some of the equipment would be putting off, or the amount of time some of the tasks would "actually take". It was a fun casual experience that gave you 'just' enough complexity to try to figure out how to best deal with issues. What loot should I place where, where should my genius hang out to better help the stats of the minions.

This game, decided that you need to play an HVAC tech, balancing out the temperature in every room and every piece of equipment. You can’t just amass a stack of cash, and hold onto it, you’re paying your entire workforce emptying out what ends up being a comically massive vault space when you start bouncing off 100% full. Instead of having some computers, and some data stores, and a set amount of missions; Here’s 3 different types of computers that you have to spend time balancing, and figuring out where to place them, and where to use the broadcast power. Instead of just letting your science minions “figure stuff out” and you getting a stack of research to do every so often. Here’s a map of research you can only do one at a time, ignoring how many minions you actually have to perform this research. The interruptions, notifications, and non-musical audio was rough in the first, but man.. The incessant notifications, and pop-ups, and screens forcing you to pay attention to them all feels like this game was made to target tik-tok users.

I’ve a pretty long stack of direct comparisons like that, but the main theme is there’s flavors of the original, present, but the team focused far too much on the “un-fun” aspects of the first game and turned those up to 11. Making jokes of the geniuses, the marvel-esque dialogue, the dumb loot (At least the first few) kinda gives this a poor satire vibe (Too on the nose from the satire of the 60’s the first one was). I’ll probably keep playing it for the time being to see if it gets any better, but I doubt it.


TLDR; if you’re here because you liked the first, this isn’t where you’re gonna scratch that itch; Mod the original and keep looking.

If your a fan of world domination, while building base and some decent writen missions with a bit humor thrown into the mix, this is a game for you.

You are the villain, that's a good thing, now go dominate the world