YMMV / Evil Genius

• Awesome Music: The soundtrack is a marvelous pastiche of James Bond-esque music, played by an actual orchestra, and won a BAFTA. It's little wonder that the developers of the sequel recruited the original composer, James Hannigan, to compose the soundtrack.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • Jubei will always be your henchman at some point. He is simply the most useful henchman for dealing with threats due to his incredibly high damage with Eviscerate and his ability to teleport with Wind Walk. He's so good that the only reason people play Maximilian is because he starts with Jubei, Jubei can take on the weaker Super Agents by himself, and other Henchmen tend to be ranked by how well they support or complement Jubei.
  • Mastering Red Ivan's Difficult, but Awesome nature makes him this because he's the only Henchman who can deal with squads of Exceptional Soldiers and Veterans, something even Jubei struggles with.
  • Most bases will include at least one Ubertrap, a large trap network specifically designed to run forever once activated without killing the agents caught up in it. Not only does this permanently incapacitate any agent caught in it, including Super Agents, but trap combos generate a great deal of money. A single Ubertrap can generate more than enough money to never have to resort to Stealing ever again.
• Demonic Spiders: Soldier squads in general.
  • And then Exceptional Veterans go and turn it up to eleven from Soldier squads - they will shoot on sight, they will plant charges, and if you are not properly prepared, let's just say that they can make your life hell.
• Designated Hero: The so-called "Forces of Justice", possibly intentional to make it so you don’t feel bad about fighting heroes. Jet Chan in particular has been known to blow up your hotel while there are tourists in it. He, Dirk Masters, and John Steele will even indiscriminately murder your non-combat minions for shits and giggles.
  • After the Enemy Civil War is activated, agents who had killed their fellow do-gooders from a rival agency will earn you 'heat' by taking pictures of their bodies, essentially framing you for the act. Case file: John Steele
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Red Ivan became popular for his complete over-the-top destructiveness, so much so that he was Promoted to Playable in the second game.
  • In terms of Henchmen, The Matron and Jubei; the former for being a Granny Classic supervillain and the latter for just being so useful. In fact, Jubei was so popular that he became the only Henchman to return in the second game.
• Evil Is Cool: Well duh, that's what makes the game fun!
• Funny Moments:
  • The animations. Special mention goes to seeing a tall man who scares trained soldiers to cowering and begging for their life by looking at them crooked, leaning down to have his cheek lovingly pinched by a woman who looks like your grandmother, if she'd replaced one hand with a morning star.
  • How you deal with many of the Super Agents, especially Mariana Mamba ( You make her fat.) and Dirk Masters ( Steroids + Laboratory bio-tanks = a freak under your control.)
  • Pieces of loot scattered around your base invite your minions to stand around them, appreciating them in a knowing fashion. This is funny enough when it's a simple Construction Worker, but becomes downright hilarious when you see a meathead Mercenary thoughtfully clicking his tongue and nodding appreciatively as if he was an art critic in a museum gallery.
• Game-Breaker: Jubei and Lord Kane, used in combination, can take out the more dangerous forces of justice, including super agents, without any danger. Kane's Smooth Operator ability renders an opponent completely helpless for a short period of time, because any opponent will mindlessly stand there and wait for Kane to walk to them and perform it. Jubei's Wind Walk allows him to teleport straight to the enemy and attack them without fear of retaliation, giving him plenty of time (if Kane has a long walk) to mow down virtually anyone with his powerful blade attacks.
• Goddamned Bats: Goddamned Tourists, purely out of how annoying they are. These idiots can prove to be very frustrating for an unprepared player. Frequently, they will follow agents and minions into your base, causing them to panic when they can't escape or see something evil. Not too bad, except they raise heat if they manage to get off the island with this information in mind. Hotels are a good option to keep them occupied, but the player has to pay out the nose for them, and devote space and minions to keeping the hotel operating. Even with all that expense and manpower, Tourists are not guaranteed to stay in the Hotel. Made worse is that they can't do anything except scream and wail endlessly when panicked. You'll need plenty of social minions to keep them off your back, because when an agent manages to get in to your base, more often than not, these Hawaiian-shirted bumblefucks aren't far behind.
  • Made much worse by the fact that, in animation and audio, they never calm down - once a tourist is panicked, he or she will keep running and screaming no matter what, although after one of the tourist's stats (excepting Health) has been reduced to zero, no Heat will be gained - only headaches. Oh, and they can be panicked by things as frightening as the external doors to your topside shacks or even, if you're supremely unlucky, the doors to your hotel.
• Good Bad Bugs: A scad of them, these are just the ones that are in your favor:
  • Before the first real mission in the game (the capture of a Maid), you can send your Mooks to steal money from everywhere on the planet with no way of retaliation from the Good Guys. It's quite possible to make all the money you need for the entire game this way, let the 'heat' (negative attention) from the Good Guys fade away, and proceed to play the game normally. A Bug-Within-A-Bug exists in this situation, because if you do the mission that has you stealing a painting during this time, that nation's Heat rating will never die down ever from that time on.
  • Similar to the above, you can also use this no-interference period to have minions plot (seek out missions) in every territory in the game. While your basic Mooks can't plot very well, leaving the game running for a few hours will ensure that (once you reach plot levels), you have access to every mission in the game at all times.
  • If an object is tagged for demolition, the wear won't fall. If said object is inaccessible, it won't be demolished. Uselss normally, but brilliant for power plants. Just make sure that the power plants have no empty tiles anywhere in them, as agents targeting that spot will come out of the floor if there is no access point.
  • When double-clicking on a minion, they pause to salute you. This includes minions that are deserting and are running away. Ordering a deserting minion to be captured or executed and then repeatedly double-clicking on them will result in them being quickly swarmed by loyal minions and killed or captured.
  • Players figured out that if they built the right kind of non-lethal traps, they can build a trap that essentially never stops running and never kills its victims (known as the "Ubertrap"). In addition to an Ubertrap repeatedly generating massive amounts of money with no heat gain due to an endless string of combos going off, eventually, you will trap enough A.I.s in the game to hit the AI cap and no more enemies or tourists will spawn on the island. This literally creates an exploit where the player can stop the extremely obnoxious Super Agents from arriving at the island at all if the trap is full. The Ubertrap is so broken that it's generally considered a critical part of the base design.
  • Lord Kane's "Smooth Operator" ability, intended to be a simple heat-removal skill, has the unintended side-effect of completely immobilizing the target from the moment you give the order until Kane actually uses the ability on them. This side effect is extremely exploitable, and far more useful than the skill's ostensible purpose. You can use it to immobilize Super Agents so your minions can knock them out, and if you target the leader of a squad of agents (the one that the others are following and who tries to open doors), they'll all stop what they're doing until their leader has been talked to by Kane.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Some characters end up bearing quite a bit of a resemblance to characters from future games.
  • A.N.V.I.L. Soldiers, with their getups and their eye-concealing helmets look quite a bit like another Soldier...
  • Your Mercenary minions slightly resemble the Heavy Weapons Guy. Both use rapid-firing machine guns, too!
    • Funnier still is that an actual character from the above game was added as a Henchman in the second game, that being Pyro.
  • S.A.B.R.E. Soldiers look like Bill.
• Moment of Awesome: In the Ending after you conquer the world, the Evil Genius uses the United Nations General Assembly Hall as their throne room where they're venerated, which makes it obvious that you really have the world in your command.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The un-buildable rock that makes planning the layout of your base harder than it should be, limiting the already finite space you have to build the base. Made more grating with how sometimes you can't destroy rooms at all if you've built things incorrectly. Multiple mods exist to remove it.
  • As mentioned under Guide Dang It!, the fact that research is a giant guessing game unless you pay exorbitant amounts of money. Another two points of contention is that a) The game does not keep track of what options you previously tried, meaning you either need to have exceptional memory or keep dozens of pages of notes; and b) The upgraded items might not even be much of an improvement over what you already have, making it a net loss.
• That One Attack: Super Agents all have a special ability that sets them apart from the lesser agents. To note:
  • Mariana Mamba can use her feminine wiles to seduce your minions, making them defect on the spot and you can't make them stay in your service. You have to either let affected minions escape the island or kill them.
  • Jet Chan is Immune to Bullets thanks to his passive special ability, which means that you have to get close to him if you want him taken down. The main issue is that he is probably the best melee fighter in the game, and he takes reduced damage from melee attacks due to his skill. He's very likely to shave off Henchmen's lives as a result.
  • Katerina Frostonova will stab someone to instantly bring the victim down to zero health, and can make herself invisible to security systems and hard to spot, all to facilitate the aforementioned ability. Thankfully, she only uses this instant kill move once per island visit.
  • Dirk Masters has Suppression Fire, which involves him firing his two massive guns in an arc in front of him, which will kill any minions in the same room as him and destroy the room's objects. Fighting him head on will likely result in whole crowds of minions getting killed at once.
  • John Steele's Base Mayhem can cause hell by screwing with your base's alert level, causing explosions that set random items in your base on fire, including things in sealed off areas you don't want your minions to visit like Ubertraps and Freak Triggers. Oh, and let your freaks escape the latter by setting every door to Level One security. All he needs to do in order to activate this is just get inside your base, which is very easy for him to do thanks to his very high stats and lockpicking skills.
• That One Boss:
  • Of the Super Agents, Jet Chan in particular. Jet Chan makes players scream in raw rage, due to his combination of attacking your forces and stealing your money and loot. So much so that if Jet Chan shows up early on while you're building your base on the second island, you're better off just loading from your last save and hoping he doesn't show up again. Especially as Jet Chan is possibly the single most aggressive NPC in the game and will immediately assault any military minions who he sees, regardless of whether they're armed. Chan is a hellacious pyro too. Worse, if you have nicely separated and closed off rooms, he tends to blow them up repeatedly in the chaos and get sent back to jail to escape and start the cycle over and over.
  • John Steele's specialty is sneaking out of his jail cell and promptly planting explosives wherever he goes. His status as a nuisance is made worse by the fact that he can't be defeated in-game. Unlike the previous four Super Agents, he cannot be permanently taken out. He has an extremely irritating ability called Base Mayhem which is noted above. Steele is especially annoying since he rarely stays dead for very long and doesn't seem to see anything wrong with leaving the island and then coming back two minutes later. Prepare for lots of angrish each time any of these happen.
• Underused Game Mechanic:
  • The entire system with Tourists is rather undercooked - they don't raise heat enough to be a threat if they notice anything, but they are extremely annoying to deal with, and also the panicked shouting is very irritating since they're often scared by the most innocuous of things. Hotels are intended to keep them distracted and pliable, but the cost of building and staffing a hotel is more trouble than it is worth, compared to just shooting the tourists and stuffing them in a Freezer, or ignoring them and letting the fools run off with their heat. Rebellion acknowledged this as a flaw of the first game and promised to develop a more robust "social" system in the sequel where keeping your evil activities covert is more engaging.
  • Freaks are impossible to control, you can only have three at a time, they don't obey tags or alarms, they look immediately suspicious to any agent that sees them (especially as Freaks always try to smash them to paste), and are so stupid that they set off all traps they stumble into. With all this going against them, they can't be allowed to wander the island (unless the player simply doesn't care about being covert)... which you'd think would be the point of making them. Players who don't mind their unsubtle nature can't heal them, making a constant chore to line up more bodies to convert into Freaks. The fact is the best use for Freaks is something players came up with in the meta - herding a Freak into a small room with a motion sensor and locking them inside, creating what the playerbase calls a "Freak Trigger" that forces whatever traps its hooked up to (which can be anywhere on the island) to fire essentially endlessly because the Freak will repeatedly hit the triggers. Freak Triggers are required for the Ubertraps and since they do not have needs to fulfill, so they can be left inside their room permanently.