YMMV / Evil Genius 2

• Aluminum Christmas Trees: The 'chicken gun' your minions steal is a real thing.
• Annoying Video Game Helper: You will quickly come to hate hearing virtually any announcement from I.R.I.S. due to their relentless frequency. The 1.30 and 1.50 Patches introduced cooldowns on her reports, specifically to stop her from relentlessly spamming her messages like the following entries describe.
  • "There is something wrong with either the minions or the training room, boss." This is said whenever a minion leaves training for any reason whatsoever. If they need to take a nap, IRIS will say it. If they need to take a lunch break, if they got attacked on the way to training, any reason at all... she will feel the need to report every single instance of this momentary halt. Vaguely annoying starting out, but when you have about 150 minions and are training a big chunk of them basically all the time, this becomes maddening. Amplified by the fact that activating your Doomsday Device automatically puts the base on High Alert, which freezes all training.
  • Maxed out your vaults? Expect to hear "Your vaults are nearly full! Your vaults are full! Your vaults are almost full! Your vaults are full!" over and over as they ping between 99% and 100% from any ongoing schemes, passive income, and build projects.
  • "Several of our operations have been locked down" whenever your criminal networks generate too much heat, and "your criminal networks are idle" if you're relying more on passive income rather than constantly sending out minions (either due to lack of minions, lack of intel to run high-tier schemes, or lack of vault space for the money those schemes would produce).
• Anti-Climax Boss: The wave of Crime Lords that attack your base at the end of the game have stats that would have been more relevant at the start of the campaign rather than the end of it, having a mere 150 health rather than potentially twice that amount if they were engaged in their recruitment missions.
• Awesome Music: James Hannigan's triumphant remake of the first game's theme music heard here.
• Breather Boss: While Deep Six is no slouch when it comes to actual fighting, the process in taking him out of the map is slightly faster than that of the other super agents, as his mission arc only lasts for three missions, compared to everyone else at four. His recruitment is treated like that of a crime lord, with his third mission being divided in two depending on how the player wants to deal with him, while the super agents that can be recruited must be eliminated thoroughly first. The game also prefers that you recruit him, as you will not unlock his folder in the Rogue Gallery section if you kill him.
• Cheese Strategy: Only one wave of (non-objective-based) agents can be in your base at a time, meaning building your prison in a location deep, deep into your base and always capturing at least one agent in a wave can buy you lots of time and give you a breather in high heat situations, as the next wave won't show up until that single agent finishes traveling all the way to their cell. This is the reason why J. Steele was made un-capturable outside of a single Emma mission in an update; too many players were keeping their Steeles imprisoned indefinitely because Ms. Foxworth wouldn't appear on the map until the current Steele died.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • Almost everyone who has played through the game at least once picks Jubei as their first henchman unless they're specifically trying to get Full Metal Jackie. This is because Jubei is very powerful, easy to use, and he's one of the choices for the first henchman. Once the conditions for Jackie's questline were relaxed in a patch, there's now nothing stopping players from just picking Jubei first all the time.
  • Eli Barracuda Jr. is the other henchmen commonly selected to be the first, not only due to his more general usefulness for both Muscle and Deception, but a piece of loot flat-out requires him to be on the team early on lest said piece of loot becomes lost forever (though it's barely possible to have Eli recruited after and have access to said loot, provided that you don't move on with the breather mission that would render it inaccessible). Like with Jubei, the restrictions regarding Full Metal Jackie were repealed in a patch, opening the floodgates for players to get all henchmen and loot with ease. The only thing that would make players pick Jubei first over Eli is that Jubei's recruitment missions become available later than sooner.
  • For a more complete roster of henchmen, it's common to see people pile up on Sir Daniel, Magnolia Ming, and Full Metal Jackie by the end of the game, as they're often the most effective at simply dealing damage against enemies, which ends up being the primary directive by the endgame anyway (and to heal other henchmen, in the case of Ming). For the purpose of repelling agents through distraction, players usually take Incendio, Fugu Furukawa, and Clara Jones and spam their distraction abilities whenever possible. It helps that the process of recruiting the likes of Eli, Daniel, and Jones is necessary for gaining access to certain loot missions as well.
  • It's not unusual for players to make entire mazes of their casino using the slot machines once they unlock them, forcing agents to take a long stroll through the skill-draining machines and getting their resolve drained by local deception minions stationed throughout the maze. Because the slot machines do not require anyone to man them, are relatively cheap, and have a moderate power-cost, they make a very attractive addition to any cover operation. This method became more useful after the Cover Operation was buffed in a later patch, becoming even more powerful and profitable.
  • Unless you're trying to get the "First Resort" achievement, it's best to use traps that direct damage to enemy HP such as the laser walls and knockout gas. It's handy against Agent Steele in particular, provided the traps aren't defused, but that's why you want halls full of them.
• Demonic Spiders: The soldiers. Unlike the investigators, saboteurs, and rogues, who don't attack unless provoked in a non-casino environment, and can be driven away by draining their resolve, soldiers simply don't give a shit and start opening fire upon any unfortunate minions caught in the crossfire regardless of prior engagement; they won't fire in the Casino, but once they walk through any doors into the base proper, they'll gun down any minion they see. Expect a lot of deception minion casualties if you haven't set up your lair for a quick security response. Them even showing up in the first place causes disruption, as the mere sight of them causes tourists to flee the island in terror, tossing a nice wrench into the profits of your cover operation.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Jubei is still every bit as overpowered as he was in the previous game. His Flow ability makes him able to take on a super agent and their squad all by himself, while his Wind-Walk now being tied to his morale stat means in the event he does get overwhelmed, he can warp to the Henchman table before things get too hairy.
  • Red Ivan is a fairly popular choice for the Evil Genius, next to Emma. Military minions have cheaper salaries, and have better defense along with hitting harder when buffed by his "Do It Now" skill, allowing you to defeat agents faster while usually losing less minions. The real kicker is that Ivan is insanely powerful in combat; his basic attacks hit nearly as hard as Jubei while being ranged, and his rocket launcher deals 100 damage each with splash damage, which is enough to deal with groups of Soldiers and even Super Agents. There is still collateral damage, but it is more than worth it to easily deal with a surprise Super Agent in the early game (keep in mind that this weapon has a minimum range, meaning that Ivan will switch back to his fists should an enemy get too close). The only real downside is that Red Ivan's Doomsday Weapon can cause catastrophic amounts of collateral damage compared to the other geniuses because it makes fires break out in the Lair whenever it's used, and the higher the setting, the bigger the blaze.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • Janet Bombe, Magnolia Ming, and Sir Daniel will spawn items in your base each time they appear. Lots of them. While Sir Daniel only spawns potted plants, Janet will spawn virus spreaders that will cause an item's Durability to degrade rapidly and Magnolia will spawn gas emitters that cause clouds of poison gas to appear throughout your lair, briefly incapacitating anyone they touch and causing their health to rapidly plummet. Good luck finding all of them.
  • The tourists can become this when attempting to distract agents who show up in the casino away, as they will often stop to talk to your henchmen, preventing them from using their charm-based abilities instead.
  • Fires for Red Ivan. While most Doomsday Devices of other geniuses simply cause casualties within the minion ranks and Polar's Doomsday Device momentarily decreases the temperature in her base (in which high temperatures are of a bigger concern), Ivan's causes lots of fires to spread throughout the lair. If you're of the sort who places things next to one another (such as money vaults or power plants), there will be a viral inferno even on the lowest setting. And god help you if you intend to eradicate every part of the world at the end of the campaign...
• Good Bad Bugs: In theory, the drawbacks of using Zalika's V.O.I.D is that some minions will become brainwashed enemies that the rest of your base will need to eliminate. However, unlike with the similar V.E.N.O.M, this doesn't appear to happen outside of scripted parts in the campaign, meaning that it's safe to spam V.O.I.D without consequence. Compare that to the rest of the doomsday devices (especially H.A.V.O.C), and you have the ideal superweapon for obtaining the Total Annihilation achievement.
• Heartwarming Moments: As Red Ivan, you can recruit some old friends from the good old days by enlisting Jubei and Eli Barracuda Jr. as Henchmen. The Achievement for doing so is even called "Getting The Band Back Together."
• Low-Tier Letdown:
  • Janet Bombe and Carl Cafard are widely considered useless due to their weak combat performance and situational, ineffective skills. Janet can cause a small amount of damage to a single enemy without starting combat or she can erase all suspicion from an Investigator, but the former isn't enough to be useful (it only works on one Agent at a time and doesn't scale with the target's health) and the latter can be avoided by good base design or just killing the investigator (it also only works on one Agent). Carl can plant a trap, but you have a ton of those already and his can't be repaired, or create a fake loot item for Rogues to steal, but you don't want to be letting rogues steal from you anyway. Given that Carl Cafard's recruitment mission requires stealing a piece of loot that can easily become missable due to its early expiry date, and that his missions are almost mutually exclusive with that of Clara Jones (who's a far more useful Deception Henchman, and recruiting her unlocks another piece of loot), most people don't even bother with Carl Cafard even for the sake of offing him at the end, with how inconsequential a threat he is.
  • The Boxing Glove is the first trap you get, and also the most useless, whereas even the lowest tiers of unlockable traps like the Freeze Ray and Bubble Cannon have a chance to work on higher tier agents, the Boxing Glove seems to fail every single time to even Poor-rank foes. Its only real use is getting intel as an interrogation device, as it works much faster than the chair.
  • Most of the recruitable Super Agents that came from the World Domination community event are generally considered to not be worthwhile Henchmen, as they're inexplicably far weaker on the player's payroll (barring Wrecking Bola and Atomic Olga, who are regarded as mid-range Henchmen). All of them can only heal through an personal ability with a long cooldown and can't sit at the Conference Table to recover, crippling their combat readiness in bad situations and having less utility skills than all other Henchmen. As for the exceptions, Wrecking Bola is a reasonably good melee tank who's far outclassed by Jubei at the same job; Atomic Olga's damage is easily exceeded by basically any other Henchman with a ranged attack.
• Most Wonderful Sound: Whenever your Minion's paychecks come out, and you can rest assured that your underlings are being paid well for a job well done. Just be sure to have enough in the bank to pay them all, or the consequences could be dire.
  cha-ching! "Salaries Paid!"
• The Scrappy: Nobody likes Symmetry. Whereas the fandom's attitude towards the rest of the Super Agents run the gamut between enjoying their style and character to mild dislike, basically every player ever loathes Symmetry with a passion despite her predictability due to her nature as a literal nuisance to your existence as an Evil Genius. This is both mechanically (as stated under That One Boss below) and on a narrative level, since character dialogue between her and the Genius usually boils down to her Trolling them and being incredibly petty, and the Genius typically mirroring the player's own frustration with this jumped-up thief and her delusions of superiority. The conclusion of her questline is widely considered to be a massive Catharsis Factor, due to the utter humiliation one can put her through as payback for all of the shenanigans she's been putting you through up to that point, and the revelation that she's a massive coward underneath that cool exterior. With the update that allowed most of the super agents to be recruitable, it's also possible to recruit Symmetry if there's room, condemning her to an ironic fate, or simply present an opportunity to kill her again.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • At launch there was a fairly high chance, depending on the agent's Skill, that when an agent tagged for Distraction was stopped by a minion they would just attack and kill the offending minion. Then they'll all take pictures of the victim they killed to use as evidence against you, requiring you to capture or kill them all anyway. Super Agents, due to their extremely high Skill, will almost always shoot the minion attempting to distract them, making them effectively immune to it. This issue was mitigated in a hotfix patch, as the tendency for Agents of Average and below skills to murder Deception minions trying to escort them back to the Casino was removed, with Agents of higher skill levels having this chance reduced. Higher tier Investigators might as well still be Soldiers though, both in terms of aggressiveness and lethality.
  • Minions other than Construction Workers and Technicians now have salaries that are paid at the end of each day. This is especially annoying to players who liked the first game's lack of ongoing costs making the management aspect of the game easier. Technicians used to have no salary at launch because they are needed to balance out the new ongoing maintenance of everything in the base, a mechanic that only initially escaped this tag because technicians were free and are now a separate training tree from researchers, allowing an army of technicians on staff with no downsides... until the 1.30 Patch gave them salaries, albeit much lower ones than anyone else, along with increasing the passive income from Criminal Networks and shortening the length of Schemes.
  • Firing Ivan's H.A.V.O.C. superweapon will set most of your base on fire, and the severity of the fire is dependent on the power of the shot. Level 1 is manageable, but Level 2 and 3 causes a firestorm to take over basically all of your base. More cynical players will quickly realize there's a very good reason one of the repeatable, Ivan-exclusive bonus objectives is "build three fire extinguishers". The 1.50 Patch reduced the backfire of H.A.V.O.C. in an attempt to mitigate this issue.
  • DLC can only be used if you select it at the beginning of a game, meaning you have to start a whole new playthrough if something interesting came out after you already got a ways into things. And this is a long game, so that can hurt the appeal of trying out something new. The 1.50 Patch averted this by allowing DLC to be activated for saved games... however, you can still have this issue if you're already past the point a DLC is supposed to begin (e.g. being near the endgame likely means you can't start the Team Fortress 2 DLC).
  • Minions who spot an enemy agent through their disguises (and thus remove those disguises) suffer a debuff that quickly drains about 25 Smarts and 10 Morale from the minion. Besides making little sense, it also forces the minion in-question to go restore those stats... and the uncovered agent typically just re-applies the disguise a few seconds later. Security Cameras do not suffer these drawbacks, but considering they're limited to Corridors, this makes it extremely irksome to rely on minions to remove disguises and makes the main-draw of Counter Agents almost moot.
  • You can only tackle one side mission at a time. There are many of these, ranging from the means to recruit more henchmen, to taking out the super agents permanently, to grabbing unique artifacts that yield bonuses. The culmination of all of these means that you'll be bottlenecked throughout the campaign trying to solve each of these one by one. It doesn't help that many of them have an expiry based on main campaign progress, as well as requiring sometimes obtuse conditions to appear in the first place. The more finicky Loot missions can permanently disappear if you don't tackle them first, punishing the player for prioritizing a more urgent mission.
  • When interrogating or brainwashing prisoners, sometimes the game likes to select a henchmen to do the job, when it's far more productive to have a mere minion do it and let the henchmen do larger, more important tasks.
  • The biggest of them all is the Temperature system added in the Oceans DLC. It's nigh-impossible to find a single player that likes it. Many items in the base produce heat now; minions dislike being cold or hot and machines will lose durability quicker outside of ideal temperatures. The problems are twofold - One, temperature doesn't equalize within a room, so you can have some parts of a room that are blazing hot and others that are freezing, and two, the items that produce the most heat tend to be the items you need the most of in your base, like power generators and radio repeaters. What this ends up meaning is that you need to use even more space on the biggest space-eaters in your base - generator rooms and control rooms - to mitigate their temperature buildup, since you need to space them out to put air conditioners between them. This will probably freeze the outer edges of the room where there isn't any heat buildup, though, so you'll need to line the walls with heaters to offset the overcooling from the air conditioners you need to cool the equipment! Worse, this system doesn't scale with difficulty and cannot be disabled without turning off the whole DLC, so if you want to use Oceans content at all you're stuck with it. Fortunately, the 1.12 Patch went a long way to mitigating this by changing Temperature thresholds to be significantly easier to maintain without sacrificing Lair aesthetics.
• Sequel Difficulty Spike: Agents used to rely on numbers and teamwork to beat your generally-superior minions in the first game, with only Soldier squads posing a significant threat to your minions' lives. In the second, even the weakest Investigators can kill a startling number of minions, including Guards, if something causes them to start shooting.
• Tear Jerker: During Emma's campaign, her surprise reunion with the original John Steele is a sad one. Steele is clearly shocked and hurt by Emma's betrayal of the ideals she once held dear, even saying how she was "the best of us." Emma, for her part, carries a definite bitter tinge in her lines. The "one final lesson" line from her trailer becomes much more melancholic in context as a result.
• That One Boss:
  • Symmetry, the A.N.V.I.L. Super Rogue, is normally a Wake-Up Call Boss because she bypasses most of the conventional means players defend their base with. Once you understand how she works she becomes the most predictable and easily-spotted Super Agent^note Symmetry and her crew will spawn in a Vault; if there's more than one Vault, they may be split up from each other. That said, she morphs into the most terrifying thing in the game if her Heist Crew are high-level as well, because unlike other Super Agents and their teams they're nigh-impossible to separate, must be engaged as a group, and each one is as tough and hard-hitting as J. Steele. If she's with them as well, have fun chewing through their 1300 combined health 5 at a time while they kill every minion you have in one or two hits and take Henchmen down with alarming speed.
  • Agent X is similar, except his crew and himself can spawn in nearly any room in the game, usually the Infirmary. They are also dangerous in combat, but instead of stealing all your gold, Agent X can plant his own evidence to bring back to P.A.T.R.I.O.T. just by walking around, so even if you hide all the suspicious objects, Agent X won't be coming back empty handed. He can also leave listening devices in your base, so Agent X and his team can quickly return to your base and cause even more problems.
  • J. Steele is an utter nuisance without good Muscle Henchmen around to deal with them quickly, thanks to their suppressed pistol that can oneshot many mooks, quickly down Henchmen if they focus fire, and close combat skills. There's also the fact that Steele arrives quite a bit later than whenever Foxworth announces their arrival, as opposed to the other Super Agents who arrive at your base immediately and are thus easier to track down. Since Steele operates alone (the other Super Agents bring in several other agents to back them up), you can't even benefit from the potential POWs and resulting Intel or brainwashed recruits you can acquire upon engaging these agents.
    • The final encounter with J. Steele has you fight an entire legion of Steeles all at once. They fortunately come in waves, but considering the sheer nuisance of a single Steele, they can really wear you down.
  • Atomic Olga is also a nightmare to deal with who you do not want in your base unless you have a top-notch group of Muscle minions outfitted with weapons. She's as tough to damage as J. Steele while also being able to pump out plenty of firepower from her weapon. Unless you are extremely careful and tactical in your approach to fighting her, you'll easily lose dozens of minions to her and her force of soldiers and your Henchmen will go down with equally frightening speed. Suffice it to say, you will want her out of your hair before the endgame.
  • Sir Daniel on his later visits is more dangerous than any Super Agent because of his rifle, and the fact that he often spawns right inside your base, Agent X style. It's powerful enough to one-shot any minion and unlike everyone else in the game he can use his gun while in melee. He's the only person in the game fairly matched with a maxed-out Jubei, and might even win if he gets a few shots before Jubei gets into melee. Capturing him is especially tough since he effectively has twice as much health. He'll also clutter your base with potted plants.
• That One Level:
  • DLC not withstanding, the game has three locations to place your base. While Crown Gold is an easy, beginner-friendly location with gold deposits to help with financing and Caine Key being outright broken in terms of long-term strategy and funneling enemy agents through the front door, not many positive things can be said about Montanas Gemelas, twin islands attached by only a stone arch with little build space at the beginning and a lot of verticality, forcing a heavy reliance on researching and building stairs (which are slow to traverse for people). The limited build space at the starting floor makes it difficult to create traps and necessary rooms, forcing constant relocation. Once you've managed to dig down, suddenly you are dealing with effectively two different lairs with smaller floors and are also isolated from each other, making it difficult to mobilize against threats that spawn under the archway.
  • Icicle Point, while being more user-friendly for initial construction than Montanas Gemalas, has the dubious distinction of having at least three entry points for enemy agents, and even more of the player is curious enough to open access to the tunnels. It may be tempting to connect them and make an attempt to funnel the entry points into one, but the tunnels count as hallways, meaning that soldiers will slaughter anyone caught in between. It's better to simply leave the tunnels as they are and ignore them outright. It also lacks a basement, forcing the player to dig up, up, up. If one is willing to tolerate all this, you also cannot play on this island without the Oceans DLC enabled. Have fun dealing with the sixth Force of Justice and the Temperature system on top of everything else.
• That One Sidequest:
  • Technical Difficulties, but only if you run into it without preparing beforehand, as having extra Technicians to spare and a lot of Capacitors built in advance can alleviate most of its issues. What this essentially does is that all of your generators will be disabled every now and then, which completely disrupts all functions for several seconds if you don't have (enough) Capacitors, until you've thrown enough Technicians at the mission nodes (that spawn in sequence, not at once) to suss out where Janet Bombe is hiding. On its own, this side story is only mildly inconvenient at best, but throw in a Super Agent or two in the meantime and you'll be having your work cut out for you, as all of your security measures will be down during a blackout, and minion training machines will also not work without power. The absolute worst-case scenario is this happening just as payday comes up, cutting off your income from your operations in the world. Having to deal with Janet's shenanigans can be a very tempting incentive for players to off her at the end of her quest chain, especially considering how she's not all that effective as a Henchman to begin with.
  • If you can get it to trigger, there's also The World Is Hot Enough. Every time you complete an objective within this side story, a series of fires will break out in your base. You’d better have a lot of fire extinguishers, or else you’re in trouble!
• Underused Game Mechanic: A few.
  • Like the previous game, you can chain traps into other traps. However, unlike the previous game you don't get any bonus cash for doing it, only a scant few traps can chain to begin with, plus an agent disabling one trap in a chain will throw the whole chain into disarray. The Portal DLC addresses this somewhat by being a long tutorial on how to use and combo traps, but other than that they're rarely used.
  • There are mechanisms in the game to manipulate the flow of tourists to and from your Cover Operation and ways to use those tourists to get more money. This never gets used during any mission. Further, few players will use them due to the Schemes having a short lifetime, tourist-scamming mode disabling an attraction's ability to affect Agents, and the abundance of money from passive Criminal Network income and S.M.A.S.H. Schemes rendering the bonus income unnecessary. Additionally all that work is completely wasted once a wave of Soldiers shows up since they'll scare off all the tourists.
  • Although the ability to build multi-level bases was part of the game's marketing push, players often don't have to go more than one floor up or down during a playthrough because the ability to dig into the toughest rock isn't unlocked until the end, at which point players have already set their base layouts and making use of the extra space would require laborious rearrangement as the Forces of Justice try to stop the endgame.
  • In regards to the temperature mechanic of the Oceans DLC, there isn't a single moment where having to deal with colder temperatures is a major concern. While hotter temperatures are commonplace due to the heat output of power generators, which are both constructed in great abundance and give out a lot of heat, necessitating a lot of air conditioners, there's no such building that produces an excess of chilliness. The drawbacks of Polar's Z.E.R.O temporary temperature decreases can be brushed off with ease.