EG2 and a General Review

[Beardyface86]

So I was delighted to see Evil Genius getting a facelift. I'm going to get my broad TLDR out of the way before anything else, EG2 is like a 6.5/10 where I would have given EG1 a 9/10. I don't hate this game and they managed to capture a lot of the humor and style of the original game, however there are major annoyances that keep this game teetering on the edge of being an excellent successor but never quite there. I'll discuss below. Continue at your own risk.

I'd like to start by saying that I played the original years ago and it is a favorite of mine and occupies a truly unique space in my heart like no other. Spy-Fi is an underused genre and it's always a delight. The first was a deep enriched experience that had a lot of elements working for it and it wasn't without its bugs. EG2 has managed to capture the feel quite well and the humor in a lot of places is absolutely on point. There's a wide array of familiar things to do and a LOT of quality of life upgrades that make base building so much better. The addition of dirt alone is a godsend in getting my base as I want it, as well as the ability to move item and blueprint the room before finalizing. The game is rich in character and charm like its predecessor. Its an exceptional example of how to keep the spirit of a game healthy.

Dislikes:
What I don't like about EG2 isn't even close to the bugs, which are largely forgivable. It's in fundamental structure. The game reuses assets and animations a lot. It's very noticeable in instances like furniture and bodies and its a weird shortcut when the first game didn't even cut those corners with both distinct body bags and boxing and unboxing animations. this game relies on the magic multiuse gun for just about everything, Decoration items are recolored and identical room to room. The most egregious atrocity is the World Stage...

IT FEELS BAD MAN. REALLY BAD.

The World Stage is stupefied to a point where its annoying. On its own merit, its incredibly annoying. There's this constant struggle with heat that only becomes a worse and worse experience as you control more zones. It's not challenge either. Its just a constant ticker that you can't fight effectively or do anything about. You can influence it slightly with items but 9/10 times they lock down and force agents to your island. It's not a managable mechanic because it's an inevitable mechanic. The agents show up and because heat isn't managable, agents getting heat means little to nothing if they escape. In addition, the control room aspects of the World Stage are absolute trash. Broadcast stations are egregiously MASSIVE and do very little. At one point I had over 100 in a massive room BIGGER than my POWER ROOM with NUCLEAR Reactors because I wasn't at the right point in the campaign to research the other ones. The computer panels generate Intel so inefficiently to a point where its faster to simply capture and torture agents. The screens make no noticeable difference to heat reduction either. Like I mentioned before, heat is inevitable and unstoppable and it makes everything revolving around heat either incredibly annoying or incredibly useless.

Minion Issues:
While I'm on the World Stage, I'd like to talk about minion assignments. I have no idea why minions are suddenly disposable assets when they absolutely have animations for returning from the helipad with items and I can't concieve of any reason why they have to be expended. It's a mechanic that only serves to slow you down and constantly retrain, and this magnifies with the fact that agent teams of almost any type take an ungodly amount of punishment while your 30 Muscle minions get shredded by some noodle armed burglar fighting solo. It drags the pacing of the game down to a crawl because a lot of time you have to fight with the clock to retrain minions before new agents arrive while also having to have minions for permanent dispatch.

Research Issues:
Another unecessary chokepoint in this game is research. Its SLOW and it pauses CONSTANTLY. Scientists do not staff the room like the guard rooms do and the one at work gets tired and leaves, leaving research to be a long toil. To make matters worse, a lot of side jobs REQUIRE proprietary research that doesn't do a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ thing for you other than check a box for a mission.

Comparisons to EG1:
Theres a lot different, a lot of it is good and a lot of the rest holds this game back immensely. Theres a rhyme and reason to most things in EG1, the intercom system for instance makes tracking down tagged people much easier because it doesn't bind guards to a single room, and lets you mobilize from any room unlike EG2 which cause routing issues and delays. TIME CLOCKS are another important piece of the puzzle that were an unsung necessity, they allowed you to set the staff level of any given room allowing you to set priority to how many minions in any specific areas you needed. Without it, minions wander and are often in inopportune places. Henchmen having the ability to call a posse also makes a huge difference, for the LONGEST time in EG2 you have ONE henchmen and those Super agents are massively overpowered compared to a single henchmen, especially with their own agents. The lack of this ability to collect minions on the henchmen dramatically reduces henchmen effect. The stupefication of traps, stats the tagging system and the World Stage are hard felt comparing the two. Traps are nowhere near as robust as the first game and agents almost always destroy them. The World Stage lacking the balancing act of playing Social/Muscle/Science minions to affect mission outcomes for heat/success/time respectively has been replaced by something a lot less fun and interesting. Research is also a hell of a lot more boring. Presentation of the information in a window that cost money and is just something you can see isnt as interesting as having the scientists constantly roam the base and come back with innovative ideas based on the things they see. There's an element of mystery, immersion and presentation in the way EG1 does it thats not present in EG2. The presentation of "Side Stories" in a window runs afoul of the same issue. There's a certain thrill to discovery and exploration of the World Stage in the first thats more grabbing than "push button start mission" and this would be more invigorating if the missions on the World Stage itself wasnt just canned rearrangements of the same missions over and over. It would also be better if heat was a managable asset like in EG1 rather than this unfun constant back and forth of canned money mission, canned heat reset mission loop.

Comparatively, there's a massive gap of clever mechanics between the two games and EG2 suffers greatly for its dumbing down of the complex elements.

Conclusions:
The game isn't awful. It's most definitely not a Dungeon Keeper by EA fiasco, but it's not a Sid Meier's Pirates(2004) either. It's frustratingly close to being amazing but falls ever so short. It's playable, funny and captures the essence of the older game but fails to get past shallow and frustrating mechanics. If I had to recommend it, and I do, I'd say to wait for a sale and play the original in the meantime.

[BlackDev]

I can actually agree with a lot of that. Especially with the disposable minions and reused assets. I too miss the time clocks really bad. EG2 always feels like the job system is messed up and you lack the control of whats important and what not.

I think one of my biggest complaint so far is the missing radio broadcasts. Literally all the heists I did so far feel kinda meaningless. Not remember worthy at all. In the first evil genius, it was always a feel of accomplishment when the funny line about the super evil job you just did came over the radio. In EG2 I just feel detached from how the world reacts.

That said though, I'm now ~50 hours into the game (yea, judge me) and I really like it. But it lacks so much good stuff from the first one and I don't understand how the devs made let it fall so short there. I really hope at least a few bits of that can be delivered with feature updates and patches.

[Roland]

So far I find it very enjoyable, I was happy to pay full price as I knew what I was getting. The campaigns are long and with 4 geniuses you can have 4 playthroughs that will be refreshingly different but still 60% the same. This is fine by me.

I would love the simple quality of life stuff, like being able to restrict areas as no go zones, tell minions to use specific weapons and the ability to link traps together and synchronise their effects.

The art style is very nostalgic and I love it, sure I would like the return of body bags and the freeze locker as the magic corpse gun does feel abit cheesy but it's hardly game breaking. I can easily see myself getting 500 odd hours out of this game in the long run which is outstanding considering you can pay $100+ for new releases these days and get about 10 hours if your lucky.

Bugs are meh, they will get fixed. Sure they are annoying but that's just life. I'd still give it a 8/10.