You just can’t keep a good villain down, huh? While somewhat unfortunate for us in the real world, it’s fantastic news for devilish scheme ’em up Evil Genius 2. Spoiling their schemes with a new “gameplay” trailer aired during tonight’s PC Gaming show, developers Rebellion revealed a few of the fiendish new traps henchmen heading to their sunny bad guy management sim later this year.

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Evil Genius

, the 2004 minion-gathering, Bond-defying base-builder is free right now, if you link your Rebellion account to Steam. This is of course to whet appetites for the upcoming Evil Genius 2, which is expected out this year.

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Remember that thing you like from 10 years ago? It s probably getting a sequel. Shenmue 3. Evil Genius 2. Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines 2. The calendar of upcoming games is packed with throwbacks that will revisit the worlds we left behind over a decade ago. Oddworld: Soulstorm is heading back to the strange homeland of Abe the skinny green freedom farter. Mechwarrior 5 is booting up a bipedal destruct-o-bot that was powered down in the year 2000. If your favourite childhood game is not getting a sequel, it’s probably getting a glittering remake.

Reviving forgotten entertainment relics is nothing new (hi, George Lucas) but the recent glut of resurrections has made me wonder: why are developers and publishers so keen to go back to old ground? Why do they want to chase this sense of nostalgia? So, I asked them.

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A lot of genres have had a resurgence over the past five years, but none more successfully than management games. There are now more ways to direct trains, lay conveyor belts, coral visitors and profit, profit, profit than you could play in a lifetime. The question is: which of these famous timesinks is worth your time, and which of the whipsmart new hires can compete against the hagard, seen-it-all old dogs?

That’s what this list is for. These are 20 best management games you can play right now on PC, in no particular order, and updated for 2019.

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Almost two years after announcing it, Rebellion have given us our first glimpse of James Bond-ish super-criminal sim Evil Genius 2 at E3’s PC Gaming Show, plus plans to launch next year. Sequel to Elixir’s entertaining 2004 Dungeon Keeper-alike, it’s all about balancing the (evil) books and designing your volcano isle hideout for maximum work efficiency and resistance to super-spies. From the brief glimpse we get today, the sequel offers more of the same, but with the surprisingly major addition of multi-floor lairs, all the better to hold the loot your minions steal. Below, a trailer.

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Almost two years after announcing it, Rebellion have given us our first glimpse of James Bond-ish super-criminal sim Evil Genius 2 at E3’s PC Gaming Show, plus plans to launch next year. Sequel to Elixir’s entertaining 2004 Dungeon Keeper-alike, it’s all about balancing the (evil) books and designing your volcano isle hideout for maximum work efficiency and resistance to super-spies. From the brief glimpse we get today, the sequel offers more of the same, but with the surprisingly major addition of multi-floor lairs, all the better to hold the loot your minions steal. Below, a trailer.

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Base-building is de rigueur these days, what with all those survival games, Minecraft, Fallout 4 and now Fortnite, but before all that we had tiny top-down or isometric worlds in which we diligently built cities and dungeons and theme parks and rail networks. The central appeal of management games was and is that they give us an idealised sense of what it is like to create a game – to weave new worlds upon our screens, guided only by our imaginations, ingenuity and the limitations of the in-game taxation system. Magic, right there: the birth of your own universe.

For a while there, it looked as though the management flame was fading, choked by the low-grade tycoon games that littered supermarkets’ dusty games shelves. But this is The New Age Of PC Games, which means every near-abandoned idea of yesteryear has been revisited in thoughtful and ambitious new ways. Town sims and theme sims are now healthier and more vibrant than they’ve ever been, expanding. This round-up comprises the very best of the past and the very best of today: the twenty management games which are, by 2018 standards, most guaranteed to to consume your every waking thought.

These aren’t in any particular order, by-the-by: they are, simply, the 20 best management games. (more…)

Most games that put you into the shoes of the bad guys are about reveling in evil, gleefully causing havoc and destruction like a toddler who’s got into the stationary box. Obsidian’s RPG Tyranny [official site] is different.

I find a lot of fiction that centers around good versus evil tends to be unsatisfying, as evil always exists as a strawman for the ill-prepared underdogs to beat up with the power of na ve violence and good intentions, says Matt MacLean, narrative designer for Tyranny. I think video games often try too hard to make sure you don t relate to your victims, and so villains are made unrelentingly villainous, and allies are made into some combination of saccharine hangers-on or tear-jerker red-shirts waiting to be killed in order to shock you into thinking death means serious storytelling.

But how did it all work out, and what new cruelties will the upcoming expansion expose us to?

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Today, in news I never thought I’d hear: Evil Genius 2 has been announced. Evil Genius, to refresh your memory, is a 2004 real-time strategy game made by Elixir Studios, about a Bond-y villain building super secret bases for dastardly reasons while fending off meddling spies. It’s a bit like Dungeon Keeper, and it is good fun. Sniper Elite developers Rebellion picked up the rights to Evil Genius back in 2006 and, after a foolish attempt at a free-to-play Evil Genius for Facebook a few years back, now say they’re making an actual proper real Evil Genius 2. … [visit site to read more]