DESPICABLE GLEE

EVIL GENIUS 2: WORLD DOMINATION simulates both the devious delights and fiendish frustrations of being a frothing megalomaniac.

- Rick Lane

Thanks to Evil Genius 2, I now understand why so many criminal masterminds are bald. It’s because they’ve torn all their hair out through sheer frustration. When a James Bond knockoff rocks up to your secret lair and murders a bunch of henchmen with an exploding cufflink or whatever, that’s all well and good for the henchmen, who are now on a permanent lunch hour, but nobody considers the administrative headache it causes for the boss.

Now you’ve got to train new henchmen to replace the old ones, which means dipping into your pool of workers and sending them to the equivalent of thug university. This in turn means hiring more workers, which costs money you don’t have because you spent it all on replacing the traps that doublenot-seven also broke. This means spinning more moneymaking schemes, which cost yet more henchmen to set in motion, thus starting the whole cycle over again.

Being a master villain is one big headache for your big bald braincase, and it’s this villainous bureaucracy that Evil Genius 2 replicates. Mostly for the better, but sometimes for the worse. When all’s said and done, it’s a fine management title that balances brilliantly presented base-building with some genuinely challenging plate-spinning. But thank goodness it features a mechanic that lets you randomly shoot your minions, because otherwise at times I might have ripped my own skull out and thrown it at the screen.