Recent reviews by Spork

Pros: Pretty awesome combat outside the boss battles. Force powers are pretty well done. Carving your way through a platoon of stormtroopers is pretty awesome.

Cons: Too short (22 hour playtime). Too much focus on increasingly punishing boss battles (including one recycled from the last game). The player makes no decisions of any consequence. By the time you have cool force powers for managing groups of enemies, you no longer have groups of enemies.

As with the last game, the story is painfully short and kinda just ends. It feels incredibly constrained for something set the Star Wars galaxy. Along the same lines, I know the storytelling for this type of game needs to be a bit linear, but it would be nice to have more choice on some of the details. Many previous Star Wars games have allowed you to decide how far you want to toe the line between the light side and dark side while keeping with a mostly linear story.

I enjoyed the original Evil Genius back when it was released and was pumped for a, hopefully, more complete sequel that provided more of the same. I'm very disappointed to say that this isn't it.

Evil Genius 2 is an insane grind, everything is geared to take forever for no real reason. Steam says I "played" for 46 hours, most of that time was spent browsing reddit and waiting for some task or event complete so I could click the next thing that would take forever and a day to finish. And I was playing on the fastest speed the majority of the time. There are interrupts, both in the form of investigators and the "super agents" that either materialize in the middle of your base or just flat out skip/blow up your traps but those get old really quickly.

Also, base building research is gated by how far you've progressed through the game. So you can't even unlock the technology to use most of the buildable space, fun traps, or any of the space-efficient versions of things until the game is nearly over. Even if your scientists have been sitting around twiddling their thumbs for ages between main game events. Because, this bears repeating, everything in this game takes forever.

There have been patches since I have played so I won't complain about the minor bugs and inconveniences I encountered, hopefully those have been fixed/mitigated by this point. This is an industry wide problem at this point but has served as a personal reminder for me to wait for a steam sale instead of paying full price to do QA for a developer.

I will say, the art style is great. The theme is great, some of the narrative is entertaining. Base building, from a UX perspective, is also pretty good (if you weren't hamstrung on space/capabilities until the end of the game). I just wish all of this would have been attached to the original game instead of... Cookie Clicker James Bond Villain edition.