Fans of the old strategy-sim title Evil Genius heard some surprisingly good news this week. Rebellion announced that an official sequel, Evil Genius 2, “is an actual thing we’re actually coding, designing and er… arting, right now!”
Evil Genius 2 is still incredibly early in its development. The press release explains why the game took so long to produce, despite Rebellion owning the Evil Genius IP since 2006. “[Several years ago] our plan was to crowd-fund a new Evil Genius PC game and we made a series of steps to launching a campaign.” The crowd-funding campaign was put on hold as Rebellion transitioned into becoming self-published, and release other games like Zombie Army Trilogy and Sniper Elite sequels.
With the success of their shooter titles, Rebellion opted to not go down the crowd-funding route. “We decided crowd-funding wasn’t the way we wanted to go,” states the press release. “We started to feel it wasn’t fair to ask fans to fund a new game if we didn’t need them to!”
Like the first game Evil Genius 2 will be a real-time strategy and simulation game where you take on the role of a James Bond-esque evil mastermind. You’ll carve out your hidden evil lair, hire henchman, and set your sights on world domination.
The Evil Genius brand has previously been used for lame Facebook games. Rebellion promises that Evil Genius 2 “will be a fully-fledged sequel and it won’t be free-to-play.” They are aiming for a PC release initially.
The original Evil Genius by Elixir Studios released in 2004 for PC. It was widely considered as a spiritual successor to the Dungeon Keeper series with its twist of playing the bad guy and gameplay focusing on building out a lair. Evil Genius can be found on Steam and GoG. For more strategy-sim titles I would also heartily recommend looking at Dungeon Keeper 1, DK 2, and Startopia.
