melkathi

I have been meaning to rewatch Record of Lodoss War

I just did a forum search for my old Cultist Simulator posts to draw parallels myself.

You can click each of your 100 minions, the profile will be the original one. And yes, if they do something minions shouldn't, you can recognize the agent animation for that action.

Oh, God. Who comes up with these idiotic ideas? Just when you think you overreacted with the bad review, the devs decide to prove they can do worse. Agents go invisible or disguise as a minion and wander around your base (multiple floors) planting tiny items. One plants evidence, the other explosives... you have to realize it has happened (no alert) and then manually search the whole base for these to tag them for destruction.

I may or may not have discovered photo mode:

(More minions went in, so I had to disintegrate one of them with a raygun. Suddenly they all had jobs to do)

2 hours into the game, a cantina setup I wouldn't need until 6 hours into the original game, here completely overrun by minions.

Way too many power generators

Someone on Steam explained why the ESC key doesn't always work to leave menus: the tutorial pop-up message breaks the ESC key functionality...

Seriously though, disabling the tutorial, while making the start a lot harder, improves the game a lot. But they need serious balancing work. You build an infirmary. The basic medbed requires 10 power. The power generator you can build at the start of the game produces? 10 power. You want to train guards? You need a prison with a holding cell and an interrogation chair. Those will require a power generator to cover their power needs. You will need a training room, and as the punching bag requires another 4 power, you'll build another power generator. The chalkboard to train a scientist is 4 power, so that generator covers it. But to equip the research lab to do the requires tier 1 research to get to tier 2 research and the new power generators? That will require two generators worth of power. Of course you have at this point built a generator to cover the cantina, two generators for the ops room... So not having wasted energy and build more than the bare minimum of power using items and no traps, you have built 10 generators instead of maybe 4 in the old game?

Two things improve Evil Genius tenfold. 1) Turning off the tutorial. The message spam decreased. The annoying minion pop-up taking up too much space? Gone! The whole game becomes a lot less annoying. If I hadn't bought in on GMG, which didn't allow a refund (and it is the first time I thoroughly re-read the EULA to see if there was a chance), I would have refunded this game at 30 minutes playtime. Without the tutorial, and messing with keybinds, I played an hour without wanting to punch the devs. 2) Accepting that the game is not so much an Evil Genius sequel, rather a Protoss Base Simulator. The frequency with which the game tells me that I need additional pylons... erh power generators, is so starcrafty it can't but be intentional.

Figured out the Camera Rotation problem. A Dev Genius, to be Evil most likely, in the preset keybinds of the game, bound the same keys to multiple things. So Q and E rotates the camera, but also changes the build menu tabs...

My current Steam review for Evil Genius 2. It may be unfair. But do I care? The game looks pretty. Prettier than many base building games. Sadly that is what it has going for it.Controls are wonky. Having recently replayed the original game, everything about the controls in this one felt off.The game allows you to rotate the camera by keyboard with the Q and E keys or by mouse by holding the mouse wheel. Pretty standard - until you try to rotate while in build mode. Then keyboard rotation is blocked. Why?Some menues I can close with ESC. Not all menues.The UI is intrusive. It takes up too much of the screen when I would like to have room to see what I am building. The tutorial pop ups make things worse. Especially as, after having popped up, you can't make it go away. Traditionaly, when a message pops up, you are allowed to click OK. Not here. It is there to stay until it decides that it wants to leave. Of course it won't stay gone. It pops right back up. Again and again. Because large flashing messages increase your enjoyment of the game...Alerts for the world map will show up, but you can't tell what they are. Yo jsut know something is going on, not what.You may get a generic alert icon persistently sitting there on your screen that doesn't alert you to anything. So within the first couple of hours, the game is training you to ignore it.In preview videos - and there were a lot of amazing preview videos - the developer talked about the old game and how it forced you to build rows upon rows of lockers to get minions. How you ahd to build so many power generators. This game would slim that all down. Indeed. You build multiple lockers at once. Generators are slimmer. Yet, I have in the first hour, build rows upon rows of lockers, just as I would in the first game. Perhaps more. And I definitely have build more generators than I would throughout a whole game of Evil Genius 1, while still following the tutorial.I am not going to criticise the changes to the world map. I haven't seen enough of it to judge whether long term they make sense. Do I want to find out?There may be fun down the road. But with the way the UI is and the controls work, my eyes are too tired and I am too frustrated to care.

Restarting Evil Genius 2 without the tutorial. See if I get fewer pop ups and spam. Regretting the pre-order. Not for any of the gameplay reasons reviews commented on, but quality of life issues. A scientist researching at my whiteboard goes to eat. As he steps away from the whiteboard, with another waiting to take up his position right away, research is interrupted for 1 second. I get a voice message "Research has stopped". Seriously? I have 60 minions and I get voice messages for what they do? SHUT UP game. If I have an alert, let me click it to see what it is. Just having a generic alert marker pinging up because something may or may not have happened, is not useful. You can rotate the camera with Q and E or by holding the mouse wheel. Unless in build mode, then Q and E stop working. I hate using the mouse to rotate though... Second first impression is: don't wait for sale. Just get Troubleshooter instead.

So first impression of Evil Genius 2 is not overwhelmingly positive. As the review @Wormerine posted said, minions sent to the world map go poof. They are a resource to be spent. You can't choose who gets sent, so the super effective worker may rush off instead of the lazy one. That in turn makes the whole personality trait thing moot. As you can't use it, why pay attention to it? The UI is a little bit too big and too intrusive. Especially with the tutorial idiot npc. The tutorial is a bit too spammy. Instead of telling you to build a room and wait for you to finish construction or telling you to build "these three rooms", it asks you to build one, then the next, then the next. Shut up tutorial. There may still be a good game underneath it, but it definitely could have used some honest feedback for the first 10 minutes of gameplay. I can also see that reviewers, who do not have time to spend loads of hours to get a pre-release review in, will not be praising the game. 40 minutes in I made this post after all.

I'm installing, so I'll post impressions in the foreseeable future.

Which may end up echoing that review

Eh, he doesn't sound like he understood the game? Or the genre. It is a base building game a la Dungeon Keeper. You build, so you can build more cool stuff and have build something great that works more or less. Like Anno or Caesar games. What kind of criticism is "You defeat all opponents the same way, by having your minions beat them up or through traps" ? It is like complaining that in a first person shooter you shoot opponents instead of challenging them to poker or match 3 games for variety. The game may still end up being too shallow. The original was rather shallow and mostly grabbed people through theme. But this review hasn't given me anything to consider. The fact that minions sent out to the world do not come back, that sounds a bit sad - though I'll have to see if it is actually the case and they changed the system or whether he just didn't notice that minions can be lost but aren't always (just as in the first game).

Losing the will to play what you are playing? You could just play Troubleshooter. Or wait until tomorrow and play Evil Genius 2.

GMG shows the release date as 25th May

Tried out This Is The Police, but the first impression was rather negative. A lot of narration interrupted with short bits of clicking. Starting the car in the morning (which I guess is a fancy load screen) feels as if it takes longer than the actual gameplay. So I am uninstalling. I don't feel the need to see that car starting animation a fourth time.

My Steam activity feed shows people buying and playing Subverse for the first time. They probably got it for the articles...

The only news that matters:

Like Mass Effect 2 being present when my motherboard fried.