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In Evil Genius, you're Maximillian, an evil genius (of course), and you're looking to build a secret lair and develop your own underground evil society to, one would assume, take over the world. If you've watched any of the Austin Powers movies, the atmosphere of Evil Genius will be immediately familiar to you. The game has that same 60's look and attempts the humor of the movies, and that is to say, while you may be evil, that doesn't mean you're seriously evil (bad pun). The game itself is at its core a real-time strategy game. While you're building your organization, you'll constantly have objectives which you need to fill. These may vary from capturing a secret agent and interrogating him, to simply building your lair to a specific level. You'll need to recruit workers (referred to in the game as minions) and train them to fulfill various roles in your organization. You'll also get your own evil henchmen who are basically stronger, more loyal versions of your workers. The basic worker is the construction worker- these are automatically recruited for you and you can set the pace at which they're recruited. To train soldiers to protect your base, or to train any other type of employees, you'll have to build a training room. You can build other types of rooms in the game as well - among the rooms are Barracks (sleeping quarters for your minions), Corridors (hallways), and Freezer (holds dead bodies). Each room has its own set of items you can populate the room with - for example, in the Barracks you can furnish the room with bunk beds and closets.

I liked that you can customize where and how big each room is, and what items and how many of them you place in that room. In a way, it's like building your own crib. Each item does have its own significance, however, so it seems like you actually need to get at least 1 of everything you're given the option of buying. At least in the demo, there is nothing you can purchase just for pure decoration purposes.

While the tutorial does a decent job of getting you started, I frequently found myself frustrated with figuring out how to do something. I ended up reading the entire help section, which gives good background information on the various aspects of the game. My frustration with the interface is that when I had an idea of what I wanted to do something, I could never do it intuitively. I found myself helpless and not sure what to do.

Graphically, the game is simplistic but colorful. One thing I noticed immediately is that the game will run well even on older, lower performing machines. There is nothing that would qualify as eye candy, but the visuals represent the Austin Powers-ish atmosphere well. Maximillian himself looks like a fatter version of Dr. Evil. Voice acting, which was generally limited to your female "#2" (right hand man, second in command) in the demo, was well done. Like the graphics, in the sound, there's nothing fancy, but it all integrates smoothly into the gameplay.

Combat is fairly simple. It's run on the tag system like everything else in the game. With the tag system, everything that you command to be done is given a tag (think of it as a queue command system). As time passes, each tag will eventually be taken care of. If you click on a certain person, you can select whether to kill a person, ignore them, harm them mentally, or capture them. A visible tag is placed on the person and your minions will go out and attempt to execute your tag. As far as I could tell, there's no way to group a bunch of enemies (to select them all to be attacked instead of individually placing tags on each person) or even your minions so you can move them in unison or plan some sort of attack strategy. This may be due to the fact that your minions are normally not supposed to be directly controlled by you- you only help guide their actions. In general, though, while I feel there is a high level of detail (many aspects have to be considered with each decision) with every single object in the game, I think navigating through it all and being able to understand how everything relates to each other is more tedious than enjoyable, and hope the developers will simplify the process before completion.

Going back to my original gripe about hiding features in a demo, Evil Genius hides certain types of buildings and items that it seems you would have access to if this were the regular version of the game. For one thing, the demo doesn't let you know what these things are, so you have no idea what you're missing out on. The interface simply grays them out and says "Demo" over them. To find out what I could be missing, I'd have to go read more about the game. Sure, it seems like there could be a lot of great things in the game, but I never got to really have fun with the demo, and the demo is really is supposed to be quick, but a highly enjoyable preview into the game isn't it? There is nothing I can point to and say, "Wow, that was really cool!" The game seems like it has potential- if done right, the game could be like No One Lives Forever in terms of atmosphere and story, with nice lair building and evil organization building aspects. Austin Powers' obvious influence on Evil Genius' suggests that game could be funny as well.