Evil Genius 2: World Domination released on PC about a week ago. But despite the excitement, the villainous base building strategy game appears to be underperforming on the market.
They name may sound familiar. It is a sequel after all. The game follows up on the original Evil Genius game, which released in 2004 (which was inspired by 1997’s Dungeon Keeper). Like before, the player controls an evil villain, as they establish and manage their own secret lair. This includes performing heists to get money, ordering around henchmen, and stopping spies and secret agents from infiltrating your base. It’s all very 60s Spy Movie-esque.
While Evil Genius 2 offered a handful of improvements from the original game, improved graphics, more villains, additional campaigns, it appears to not be retaining the same level of interest. Since it’s release, it has received somewhat underwhelming scores from both critics and consumers. The latter are even less happy, giving it a “mixed” rating on Steam and an average score of 6.6 on Metacritic.
So what went wrong? We read through various reviews from critics and players and noticed a couple of similarities. While the game was all around praised for the creative direction (graphical style, writing, audio/music), there seems to be a drop-off in enjoyment the further the player would get into the game. Many claim that the core gameplay loop lacked depth, resulting in a somewhat tedious grind in order to progress.
It just goes to show that it doesn’t matter how pretty or fun you game looks. If it doesn’t play well, people won’t enjoy it. And in all fairness, there remains to be plenty of people out there that aren’t at all bothered by the supposed grind. That might include you.
Evil Genius 2: World Domination is available now on Steam (not on consoles) for $39.99.
