Oh Evil Genius 2, you had such high hopes before your release but seem to be yet another middling Rebellion brand release. I’m not sure how they do it, I mean the concept’s are always solid and the games are never bad but they always manage to feel a tad… tedious. Unfortunately Evil Genius 2 is no exception, whether it be the inclusion of Denuvo (for some reason) or the weird battle-pass monetisation attempt. Even the core gameplay while perfectly serviceable can’t compete with Evil Genius 1, which while occasionally frustrating was a really enjoyable and unique experience. Of course a sequel would struggle to be as unique, but it could at least be more enjoyable. Alas Evil Genius 2 is not better to play than it’s predecessor, and while is visually more impressive contains a laundry list of caveats.

So I better get right into it. On the one hand, you have more Evil Geniuses and Henchmen to choose from – which is good. But at the same time, the process of taking over the world is less engaging – which is bad. There are more maps to choose from – which is good. But these newer, larger maps with multiple stories are hamstrung by a tight 300 minion limit that can’t removed – which is bad. There are some nice Quality of Life improvements, like guards automatically carrying their weapons around without the base being on high alert – which is good. At the same time the technology unlock system feels excruciating slow at times and often bottlenecks progression – which is bad. The world map where you conduct your schemes is easier to manage and far less prone to randomly killing a team of your minions – which is good. But this also means that you can basically negate any risk of base invasion with relative ease and thus make the game incredibly easy – which is bad. The graphics are prettier – which is good. But the general tone and visual design has taken a bit of knock in my opinion – which is bad. The soundtrack is still good – yes, that’s good. While the narrative railroading of the game with relatively low effort quasi-cutscenes makes the whole thing cheap – which is bad. Overall Evil Genius 2 is really a mixed bag and while it’s certainly not a bad game, this feels like a case of one step forward one step back. Maybe I’m just biased because the first game came almost out of nowhere and was excellent, but this feels like a wasted opportunity on Rebellion’s behalf.

At this stage in the review, I really ought to have explained what the game is actually about for those who haven’t played either of the Evil Genius games. Essentially Evil Genius is a base management simulator loosely inspired by the Dungeon Keeper series, which plays a bit like the various real-time tycoon games that are out there. You’ve got a variety of rooms you can build, items to place within them and then minions that you’ll need to keep everything running. The whole thing functions as a feedback loop of sorts, as you’ll need more rooms and items to get new types of minions that let you run new schemes and research new tech, so that you can unlock new rooms and items. In terms of the gameplay itself, it’s mainly managing and optimising your base to ensure that you have the right amount of minions and access to everything you’ll need to progress the narrative. Alongside some very light “strategy” sections on the world map, where you can send minions off to conduct various schemes. You’ll also need to queue up research, manually set how many of each minion type you want and place those rooms/items. The main threats to your steady growth are waves of hostile NPCs that will occasionally spawn in. Those schemes on the world map generate heat, and the more heat that’s been generated the more likely that enemies will spawn in. Higher amounts of heat correlated to stronger waves of enemies. You can build various traps in the corridors of your base to deal with them, but you’ll want to have a decent amount of security minions that can engage them in combat. Finally you can unlock up to 5 henchmen at a time, that are all strong in combat and have a handful of abilities each. To unlock them you’ll need to finish side missions, which will involve sending various minions to various schemes on the world map.

So with all that being said, Evil Genius 2 is a quasi-business tycoon game that is a mixed bag compared to it’s predecessor. As mentioned the gameplay can be simultaneously too easy and yet too slow, which means that I spent a decent amount of time waiting for research to complete so I could reach the next stage of the game’s main quest-line. It’s fun enough to micromanage your base and the world map schemes have moderately amusing descriptions, but the actual moment-to-moment gameplay can feel a bit one note and monotonous. There are a few twists to keep the pace up like a designated end of game boss fight (of sorts) alongside Super Agents that are powerful versions of the normal agents (one per geographic region). While the boss fight is cool, it’s at it’s best when you ignore the various Super Agent neutralisation missions as otherwise it’s pretty easy much the rest of the game. As for the Super Agents themselves, they’re actually not too much trouble to avoid (as they only activate if they spot you starting a scheme where they are on the world map) and aren’t even too much of an issue to deal with most of the time. As for replayability, it’s fairly minimal. Despite having 5 different Evil Geniuses to choose from, they all play pretty much the same and have the same minions/rooms/items to deploy. It’s also worth noting that these geniuses you choose, all control the same. While they have some different abilities, they’re essentially the same as your henchmen in terms of combat ability. So they’re strong, but you’ll generally not put them on the frontlines once you hit the mid-game as if they die 3 times it’s game over.

Not that you’ll ever encounter a game over unless you are quite frankly angling for it. Instead money is likely to be the only limiting factor to your playthrough, outside of the time it takes to research things. Money is a bit strange, because it’s not hard to earn but at the same time you’re often fairly limited as to how much you can store up. Items to better store your gold are of course, unlocked through the lengthy and time intensive research system. So for most of the early game, you’re kind of just treading water until you can really start stacking up the cash. At this point though I feel like I’ve harangued the game enough for you get the idea. It’s a bit sluggish, it’s a mixed bag, but it’s still enjoyable enough. The soundtrack is good and feels appropriate for the era. If you’re a completionist, then there are tons of side objectives to grind through. The base management aspect is enjoyable enough and rewards the efficient use of space. The visuals are impressive and the traps are varied enough to be enjoyable to use, even if most of them aren’t particularly great.

In conclusion then, Evil Genius 2 is a solid if slightly disappointing game. I don’t regret playing it by any means and have actually played through it twice (once with the post-launch DLC character) and had a decent time with both my playthroughs. At the end of the day, in spite of the good graphics, Quality of Life improvements, pleasant soundtrack and so on it’s just not as easy to recommend as the much cheaper Evil Genius 1. As such I would recommend the first game, over Evil Genius 2 to anyone who is interested. For those who have played the first game, I would say that the second will be bittersweet at best. It’s more of the same, but a bit more lame.

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Railroad Corporation is another one of those games that I don’t remember buying, and can only assume that I got it included as some sort of bundle. Unlike most games with that earn that dubious epithet however, I actually thought Railroad Corporation looked interesting and wasn’t that bad to play. I’d even go so far as to say that I had fun with Railroad Corporation and found it to be a bit addicting. With that being said, it’s a pretty standard railroad business simulation game. You control a railway company, you need to build the tracks between various settlements and then run trains between them. The idea being that you’ll transport various resources between towns, farms and mines to earn a profit and to grow those settlements. As the settlements grow, they demand a broader range of products and these “higher level” products provide higher profits. There are the standard additional add-ons, like the ability to buy businesses, research new types of trains, hire staff for modest bonuses (e.g. cheaper bridges or more profit for transporting grain) and so on. As for the setting, it’s America during the 19th century which is par for the course. Most games in this sub-genre use this setting, down to the time-period and what trains you can research and eventually buy. In terms of the content you get, there are 12 campaign scenarios where you race to achieve various tasks (e.g. deliver 20 shipments of cloth to settlement X) and the ability to play these maps in scenario mode. Honestly so far it’s pretty standard stuff, nothing particularly exciting in terms of the setting, narrative, gameplay mechanics or amount of content.

In fact one of the biggest things to note about Railroad Corporation is not what it adds, but what it takes away. Unlike basically every other railway management game, in Railroad Corporation you can’t set signals or otherwise decide what routes your trains will take. Instead everything is managed by the game, on your behalf. You still decide which trains to run, where they go and what items they load or unload, but that’s about it. This makes it both very approachable, and also a tad bizarre. From my own experience, the AI is actually good at managing these train routes. Yet the omission of the ability to customise routes is definitely something that felt surreal even if I actually didn’t miss it too much. Aside from this aspect of the railway management being culled, my only other issue with something lacking was how the game managements owned businesses. As mentioned, you can buy any business in the game via an auction between yourself and all other players (including the AI competitors). The catch is while in other games you would still receive money as per usual for delivering to your own businesses, in Railroad Corporation you… don’t. So if you buy a wheat farm, you don’t have to pay for grain. On the flip-side, if you buy a farm that takes grain to produce meat, then you don’t get paid for delivering grain to a farm you own. Which is fine, but if you own all the stages of a production chain then you end up with multiple trains that are seemingly in the red. Often to staggering sums. You’ll still make a profit overall once the end product is delivered to a city, but when checking whether each train is profitable these trains really stand out for the wrong reasons. Oh and before you ask, no you can’t sort your list of trains by the type of train, profitability etc. Which is another weirdly missing feature, albeit a more minor one.

The real issue I had with the game though, is that the campaign is quite often a bit annoying. There are a few reasons for this. Firstly halfway through the campaign it goes “oopsie woopsie, we’ve reset all your research :3” so you are dumped back on the most basic of trains which is a bit of a kicker. In Railroad Corporation the various research projects are expensive and often take a lot of time, so having them reset halfway through the game is a pain. Fortunately the fact they take a lot of time isn’t an issue in reality, because so do most of the later scenarios. I would spend around 3 hours on a lot of the Act 2 missions and apparently I was about 10 hours ahead of the times on the HowLongToBeat website. This is partly due to them being a staggered series of objectives, most of which are somewhat convoluted (e.g. transport 20 high-tier products to this one place on the opposite side of the map). It’s mainly due to the AI players being a total pain in the backside to deal with. They’re not hugely difficult to overcome, but they are really annoying to deal with. Not only does the game often give them advantages in the form of better resource supplies and thus the potential for better railway connections, but they’re also exempt from various requirements. In addition they operate fairly quickly, don’t need to dabble with research and love to start auctioning off various industries as soon as they are able to. On the other hand, they generally aren’t that difficult to overcome because they are stupid. They’ll always get stuck at a certain point, and while they do grow at a constant rate they seem reluctant to share railway tracks and as such tend to avoid anywhere you’ve already expanded to.

Yet while the AI is easy to overcome in the long-run, the missions are often structured in such a way so that they’re most difficult from the very beginning. I wouldn’t say that the campaign of Railroad Corporation is particularly hard, but the Act 2 missions really stack the cards against you at the start of each one. You’ll often barely have time to complete the first objective or two, and constantly be struggling to balance your overdraft with the hard-coded requirements. Making a single rail-line can often make or break the early stages of a scenario in the later missions. Once you’ve overcome these exceedingly tight requirements though, the missions become much, much easier. To the point that you’ll always have plenty of time to start maxing out your research tree because you’re just waiting for the last objective or two to get wrapped up. It’s a weird issue that hinders the overall enjoyment of the campaign somewhat, because you’ll end up getting stuck in a mission for a few attempts due to one or two early objectives then breeze through the rest of the mission for a couple of hours. As such it can feel pretty inconsistent, and the only time events spiralled out of my control was due to the AI cheating. Well, maybe it’s more fair to say that the scenario cheated on the AI’s behalf, but it was much easier for the AI to reach a certain company valuation before me because it had a much better layout of various resources and towns. Otherwise the missions are either easy (like the first 6 in Act 1) or front-loaded in terms of challenge.

With all that being said, I still that Railroad Corporation is a decent enough game in spite of it’s wonky balancing and missing features. As stated at the top of this review, I had a fun time playing through it despite the occasional set-backs and was able to power it through it without too much trouble. The scenarios themselves provide a pretty solid introduction to the game’s mechanics, and while there isn’t much additional content once you’ve blitzed through them the game does have a bunch of DLC and even some free post-launch scenarios to work through. As for the actual gameplay itself, Railroad Corporation is fairly competent and handles well (albeit with some significant slowdown during track-laying) while still offering some depth. Between the ability to build new businesses, upgrade stations, research new trains and hire staff there’s plenty to do to optimise your company. The basics are all there and work fine, while the additional tweaking and twiddling does let you gain an edge over the AI.

As for the rest of the package, well it’s fine. You’ve got some period appropriate music that’s nice enough even if I felt like the OST is a bit too limited for it’s own good. While the music isn’t bad, most scenarios take a few hours and as such the music tends to loop a bit much. As for the visuals, I think they’re pleasant to look at although you can’t zoom in too much unlike some other games in the genre. Everything looks pretty good and as mentioned outside of track-laying the game performs well on high settings, at least on my current laptop (with a Nvidia 4060 and 12th gen intel i7 12700). There’s therefore not that much to complain about, aside from grousing over one or two missing features and the weird difficulty curve that this game has. Otherwise it’s a good looking, well playing and fairly optimised game albeit nothing particularly special.

In summary then, Railroad Corporation is a perfectly acceptable game in the railway tycoon sub-genre. Nothing about it really stands out as being great, but it doesn’t really have any significant negatives either. Sure there are a few things I could quibble about like occasional performance dips, the way that the game autosaves over it’s last autosave when you’ve loaded it, some wonky balance and a fairly bland setting but there’s nothing major to whine about. It’s just a decent little railroad game, that will take you around 25ish hours to get through. There’s enough content to justify the price, even if it’s hard to recommend this game over it’s competition. After all, this is a space with some stand out games like the Railroad Tycoon series and even for my money Sid Meier’s Railroads. As such I’d say that if you’ve played the rest, then you’ll probably enjoy this one. For everyone else, I wouldn’t recommend Railroad Corporation as your starting point. Not because it’s bad, but just because it’s not the best either.

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Quick Note: Firstly Zoo Tycoon 3 is just called Zoo Tycoon because historical revisionism is BASED. Secondly there are two versions available, the “Ultimate Animal Collection” and the base game. The base game, despite it’s name is actually cringe and you shouldn’t buy it. The ultimate animal collection adds a decent amount of content, has no build limitations on each map (i.e. you can build as much as you want) and once you’ve bought either version, you’re locked in so the marginally cheaper base game is a trap.

Zoo Tycoon 3 is another one of those Xbox One “exclusives” that are also available on PC, but which I’ve picked up for the glorious epoch defining Xbone because used copies are cheap and I like having physical discs. This initially made me uninterested in the game, because it had a bunch of DLC and I didn’t want to have to spend a lot of money on extra content that Microsoft will inevitably nuke at some indeterminable point in the future. Luckily for me and my fellow eccentrics, Microsoft decided to re-release the game with all of it’s extra content as “Zoo Tycoon: Ultimate Animal Collection”. This is version I’m looking at today and frankly thank God I waited because that build limit sounds like an absolute nightmare.

As for the game itself, it’s fun. Not ground breaking and arguably not even a good sequel, but considering the relatively niche that the game represents (or at least did before Zoo Tycoon imitators became a sub-genre of their own again) I was happy to blitz through the campaign missions over the span of a couple of days. These missions are generally pretty fun and have some unique twists, although I must confess that they do get a bit repetitive towards the end – especially with the DLC missions which don’t add anything new to the mix. The way these missions work are simple, you are given a small zoo that invariably sucks. It doesn’t have zoo keepers to keep the animals happy, it doesn’t have janitors to keep the feckless hairless apes from littering everywhere and often it doesn’t have animals in the right exhibits or toilets or something like that. So you start by zooming around, fixing all of the amateur mistakes and then need to start cracking on the mission objectives themselves. These often take the form of “raise zoo fame to X level” “keep the animals happy” “keep the guests happy” and sometimes interact with the new gimmick features this game has (more on that later). The gist for basically all of them is to stabilise the park, get profit rolling in and then purchase the right animals or just keep building up the zoo to tick the various mission checklists. It’s more fun than it sounds, but as mentioned the game isn’t ground breaking or revolutionary. Essentially you’re just playing a series of sandboxes, but with a somewhat strict timer attached to force you to spend money on the right things in generally the right order. Towards the end of the campaign, the game loves to hoist objectives on you that just take a lot of time so there’s some waiting involved which can be a tedious to be honest.

The other thing that’s tedious about this mode is the way that building things works in Zoo Tycoon 3. You see everything outside of a handful of basic structures – and I do mean basically everything – requires it to have been researched. You research it by trying to build the item and then being told you have to wait between 10 and 150 seconds for it to research (which costs money by the way) before you can build it. No, you can’t queue research so you need to say “I’d like to build a janitors office” and then wait a minute doing something else before you can build one – then realise you can’t build something else, so you need to wait for that to be researched. By the time you’re on mission 26 of 30, this starts to feel like padding because you’re researching the same things again and again and again like a medium Grasslands exhibit so you can have more than 3 antelopes. Why have more than 3? Because if there is less than 4, they get lonely and aren’t happy which means you are losing value from them. It also means they’re not happy, but they’re not real so moral qualms are an irrelevance. This might not sound like the spirit of the game, but you’re running a zoo for animals too dumb to survive so don’t blame the player blame the game. In this case the game is Zoo Tycoon 3 and it’s fun, but repetitive.

To alleviate the tedium, the game has a bunch of mechanics that are largely gimmicks but do make it great for kids and the young at heart. There’s a scrapbook (or was it snapshot album? Something like that) feature which encourages you to take cute pictures of every animal in the game. Then there’s the ability to make interactive exhibits for each animal enclosure, so that you can feed the elephants bananas or make silly faces with the chimpanzees or blast water at the rhinos. These are cute if insubstantial and I fear that a decent chunk of the development budget went towards these. The issue isn’t even that they’re not entertaining, but all animals act the same and the interactive mini-games are exceedingly shallow so if you’ve blasted a hippo with water blasting a rhino is the same experience. One last thing that’s slightly more worthwhile is the fact that you can breed your animals, which gives you a chance of getting an albino variant. This doesn’t do anything, but because Microsoft hates the achievement hunters it has spawned like poachers in the Serengeti you need every albino animal to get 100%. Oh and to have taken a picture of them too. There’s also the ability to release your animals to the the wild, which gives you some occasional notifications about how they’re doing great but otherwise doesn’t really do anything. I mean you get a slight boost to your Zoo’s fame, which is the main metric by which you unlock things (after researching them of course) but it’s barely a mechanic. You’re basically just selling them but instead of getting cash you get fame aka XP. The big fat main gimmick though is that you can switch from the overview mode, to a 3rd person mode and wander around your own Zoo. You can even drive a buggy around! No, you can’t run people over though.

Which brings to mind all the other little restricts that the game has undertaken to make everything appropriate for the kids. Even then, considering how morbid most fairy tales are (let alone the AI generated YouTube nightmares investing the platform) I can’t help but feel this is a little misguided. You can’t release the hungry hungry hippos by demolishing the fence for instance. In fact there’s no way to be anything but a benevolent zoo keeper, the game won’t let the animals hurt each other and you can’t starve them because they get swiped confiscated by less evil zookeepers. The whole thing is exceedingly twee and you’re never going to see a notification about how your released animal got killed by a fat dentist on safari. It’s not a big issue, but it also accompanies a big restriction in how much freedom you have. Because every exhibit has been pre-created, you can’t actually create a custom area for your animals – instead there are a selection of pre-made ones you are given the privilege of building. So if you want to make a sick custom lion exhibit then you can get the heck outta here. This means the game does feel kinda shallow, because you’re just slapping together various pre-made assets and outside of deciding where to place them you don’t get much say. To compound this issue, one of the main requirements guests have is that you have a good variety of animals. Which is understandable. But there are only just over a dozen species that can get in the main exhibits, with most animals being reskins of those (for example there are quite a few bears that uh… all have the same animations and needs and wants and dreams and aspirations). Most animals get shafted and are put in “mini-exhibits” which only allow between 2 and 3 (rarely 4) of them to be in a little fountain or patch of rock at a time. Can you customise these? Hahahaha NO!

So the meat of the game is less about running the Zoo you envisaged and more about the simulation of running a zoo. Or alternatively, of bumbling around your zoo like a dorky guest. Speaking of which, if you wander around for a bit you’ll notice that the various NPCs that are generated all have a handful of animations at most. Plus the skyboxes aren’t great. Which are small problems I admit and fully understand, but considering how neutered the zoo building is I think it’s a fair point to mention. I can only assume that you can’t build your own exhibits, or have a ton of different animals (like dinosaurs or aquatic life as per previous games in the series) because Zoo Tycoon 3 lets you bumble around the park in full 3D including Kinect support (WOW) with interactions instead of relying on one camera angle and sprite work. Which means that once the novelty of the gimmicks wear off, you’re relying on the core simulation aspect of Zoo Tycoon 3 to carry the experience. Alas the simulation is honestly pretty basic.

You see the way that Zoo Tycoon 3 tracks everything is basically just a simple balancing act. You have a “Zoo Fame” level (think of it like XP) which determines the variety of stuff you can buy. To get more XP, you build more things. These things cost money, but fortunately your XP increases the amount of guests visiting which generates more money. Therefore the more things you build, the more money you get to the point that you’d have to start seriously screwing around to actually lose money over time. The catch is that money trickles in, and I do mean trickles in. This is actually how the campaign missions provide their challenge, because the time limit only gives you so much time and therefore income to do everything that’s required of you. For more casual players though, this is an irrelevance. In fact it’s a total irrelevance because sandbox has no money worries at all. You just have infinite money. So the simulation is a total gongshow in the sandbox mode that most people actually care about. As for the campaign, well the money worries are only a factor because of the time limit. As for the rest of the simulation, you’ve got guest happiness and animal happiness. Guest happiness is a global value, represented as the accumulation of multiple factors such as entertainment, animal variety, bathroom availability, tidiness and so on. The problem with this though, is that it’s a global value. So if you have low bathroom happiness, you can build some bathrooms in the middle of nowhere and so long as they’re connected it doesn’t matter. Sure you’ll probably place them around the zoo in an attempt at roleplaying, but it doesn’t matter. Similarly if the tidiness if low, you just hire more janitors. Entertainment low? Build more entertainment buildings. So guest happiness is really just about keeping an eye on some meters that you can see at any time by holding down a trigger, and building whatever is needed. Keep the happiness high and people will keep coming, so you get money to buy things, to get more XP to unlock things, so you can build new things, to get more XP and then get more guests, who will want more bathrooms and so on. As for animal happiness, it’s global within the exhibit. So as long as you have a feeding machine, one interactive entertainment, one animal washer and the right habitat type plus the minimum number of animals to fulfil the social stat you’re all good. Now you do have to repair and restore the feeders and washers… unless you hire zoo keepers which you will, because otherwise it gets pretty tedious.

There are some other things you can faff around with, like advertising (which just increases the maximum amount of guest you can have over your XP allowance) and park research (which uses the same research timers so I never bothered with it) or you can optimise the prices of various things (which again I never bothered with because the defaults are fine and in sandbox you have infinite money anyway). Yet ultimately these can’t cover the cracks at the heart of the game’s simplistic simulation. So the sandbox is restricted, if appreciably good looking in 3rd person and the economy side is basically a sideshow. How can I then say I had fun? Well, the campaign missions are basically a series of light puzzles that encourage you to do all the various faffing. You’ll need to have X number of different animals, to interactive with the elephants and the chimps, to breed kangaroos and then take a picture of the baby, to do these while not letting any guest satisfaction bar drop below green and so on. It’s not an onerous challenge, but it’s still a satisfying one and trying to lay out my zoo with a tight budget and a tight deadline was often fun. Sure the sandbox mode is a let-down and everything else is a bit janky, but the campaign is still enjoyable at least as someone who only played the originals a little bit (I was too busy with Simcity 3000 and Warcraft 3).

So in conclusion, Zoo Tycoon 3 is a flawed game that struggles to compete with it’s predecessors which were made for far simpler hardware. Yet if you can overlook the game’s simplistic simulation and/or haven’t played the previous games much, it’s an enjoyable if shallow little tycoon game. Sure the sandbox is limited by having no economy, but to unlock things in the sandbox you need to play the campaign and challenge mode as otherwise your sandbox will be stuck at a low level forever. As such you need to play the other modes to get to relax in the sandbox, and these other modes provide a modest challenge and some variety. Plus the gimmicks are kind of nice, I mean the animals do look good and the photo mode and interactions are cute… at least for a while. As such I’d recommend Zoo Tycoon with two caveats. The first is that fans of the previous games will be disappointed. The second is that those who missed out on those games, will probably prefer them unless they are literally children. For those willing to give the shot on it’s own merits however, I can’t imagine that they won’t get a solid dozens out of the campaign and close to double that if they care about the challenge mode and want to play around with the sandbox side. Considering that the game is available on Gamepass or for a low price of around a tenner on disc (or Steam sale) it’s hard to recommend people avoid the game entirely. Just be aware that this is another example of a franchise who’s best days are far behind it.

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