Evil Genius puts the player in the seat of power as a newcomer villain eager to rise up the ladder of deviousness and prove to the world who is really in charge. Similar to Dungeon Keeper from the 1990's, this is a dungeon building game except with an Austin Powers flare to it. The goal is to perform global acts of infamy, each more outrageous than the last, in order to make yourself... well... infamous.

The player starts off by choosing between three different Geniuses to play, which doesn't really change the game except for some of the missions they might embark on. One specializes in technology, one mysticism, and one is a woman who wants to be the most beautiful queen of the world. What this ultimately means is the difference between stealing the Ark of the Covenant or capturing a prototype jetpack to decorate your evil lair.

In order to rise up the evil ladder and prove your genius, you have to build up your army of minions and send them out into the world, where they will research and carry out acts of infamy. These acts of infamy subvert the forces of good in a variety of hilarious ways, and are always fun to read about. Some acts of infamy require special units. So, you must also kidnap people from around the world who have the expertise you require, then interrogate them in order to gain their skills and upgrade your standard workers to better units. Advanced units are divided between three categories: military, research, and social. You can guess right away that only one class is good enough to hold a gun and repel the forces of good when they come to invade your base. However, all minion types are critical to success, since acts of infamy require specific numbers of different types in order to be carried out. So, what everything eventually boils down to is having a well-planned base to keep operations going and your minions happy.

As your level of infamy rises, the forces of good will start snooping around your island, and eventually break into your base. Here is where things start going badly for the bad guy. Due to a number of major game elements, there doesn't appear to be any proper way to repel the forces of good. The player does not exert any direct control over minions except for the henchman, who is the equivalent to a super unit. If you need someone on the island captured, killed, or interrogated, tags have to be put on the targets indicating this. However, your minions have to kept in good shape with high morale and alertness to carry out your orders. Your minions hate being reminded that they have to work with dead bodies, and will lose morale whenever they are near bodybags, which seems completely strange and outrageous. You would think an evil minion would love the fact that their enemies are being taken out. The problem is, most people are trying to get into your base, where traps and various other things will (hopefully) kill them, causing bodies to pile up in one place. You minions, who usually dispose of the bodies fairly quickly, can become completely stupefied by being near so many dead, forcing the player to execute them just to get them out of the way.

The only way to remove an enemy agent from play without killing them is by using social minions to mentally incapacitate them until they forget their mission and leave the island. This process takes an extremely long time, is rarely reliable, and is almost impossible to execute when good agents arrive in large numbers. Not to mention, agents may suddenly open fire on your defenseless social minions, depleting your ranks of precious units. The fact that only social minions are capable of using fire extinguishers (yet another improbable factor in this game) makes them a big loss that is sometimes difficult to recover from. There doesn't seem to be any point to capturing and interrogating enemy agents, even though doing so is supposed to raise the morale of your evil army. Nobody has the tendency to stop into the armory to watch the show for a quick morale boost. The other option is to build an open prison that is in plain and easy view, which seems absolutely ridiculous for all practical reasons. Not to mention, interrogation leads to death, which negates some of that hard-earned morale.

The forces of good will usually start by sending a few investigators to your island, who gather evidence, and cause more powerful units to start arriving at your base. According to the game, the best means of stopping them is to eliminate enemy units early on, but this process never seems to work. You can kill, capture, or brainwash every single agent who comes on the island, and the para-military units will still come. Additionally, there is no way to keep the forces of good out of your base! Sneaking through the front door when someone else walks through is one thing - but there is something seriously wrong when a simple investigator can break through a million dollar laser field door. Your traps protect you to a certain extent, and they can be chained together into elaborate systems to get more infamy points. However, the traps are usually easily avoided and easily destroyed. Everything, including things like beds and lockers, have a tendency to explode and set adjacent objects on fire. If there are no social minions around to put out the fire, or if they get shot before they get the chance, the player has to watch helplessly while entire rooms burn down.

Eventually the Super Agents will arrive. That's when things go from bad to worse. It's to be expected that a Super Agent will easily break into your base, cut through dozens of your minions and generally wreak havoc. Until you figure out their weaknesses, there is little for the player to do besides call in every available hand and watch them perish. Even the in-game help suggests holding on tight and hoping the agents will accomplish their missions quickly without destroying too much. The thing is, Super Agents don't "die" in the traditional sense. The best any of your minions can do is knock them out. However, there is no command to remove their unconscious bodies from your base. That means they're free to wake up and cause even more damage to your base. Worse yet, not even your henchmen, who are super units, can do anything to stop them. Your henchmen are allotted three lives each, and enemy Super Agents are the only ones who can truly kill them. Unfortunately, this process doesn't work the other way around. Combine that with the obscene amount of time it takes for your henchmen to gain experience and unlock their special attacks, and you end up with a situation where you're forced to keep your henchmen away from the battles that matter most.

There are similar gameplay issues that get in the way of the fun, the least of which is a bug that prevents some rooms from being sold. Furthermore, just about anything will set off enemy agents. They will attack innocent hotel rooms without provocation. Also, the linear mission objectives might hold a player back in that the infamy level can very possibly outpace the level of technology that they are capable of gaining before unlocking more through accomplishing mission objectives. Some of these objectives can be very vague such as finding new ways of persuasion to recruit a crime boss to your side. A player can play this game for days without figuring out what that means, and though the game has a very nice video tutorial system, it provides absolutely no worthwhile clues.

There was a ton of potential with this game, yet this title punishes players for being - of all things - evil! The style is enough to create a compelling game, and it's a shame to see all this effort wasted. There are no cut scenes showing off big heists like stealing the Eiffel Tower. The only feedback the player gets is watching a timer finish. While the theme alone makes this a title that should be great, it takes a true and determined criminal mastermind to get through this game with all its flaws.