While the concept of the game and stylish design are top notch, the execution leaves much to be desired. I love a good strategy building game, but Evil Genius really fails at meeting a steady pace and giving the player the appropriate resources and escalation of difficulty. For example, the fact that you must use minions to steal resources from the world as your only means of income, yet doing so causes attention and subsequent attacks upon those minions at such a pace that it's too easy to have no income at all is distressing. That the game does not alert you to these events as they happen is just poor planning. What's worse is that you can set up hotels on your island for exorbitant cost that bring absolutely no income to your organization, and have only week general game affects. Another big problem is the lack of pausing the real-time aspects of the game when you enter into the world planning screen. Too many times I switched back to my base to see enemy agents freely walking around my corridors.
Still, it is a fun game to tool around on for a while, so it's not a total waste of money. Just that when I think about other games in this genre (Dungeon Keeper, Tropico, Sim City), Evil Genius just can't hold up.