I'm about a dozen hours in, and running out of interest rapidly. I've always been a big fan of the old Dungeon Keeper style of games, but Evil Genius 2 feels pretty hollow. Most of the gameplay decisions you make don't have any real impact, which is the kiss of death for this game.
Most notably, the traps I've unlocked so far feel totally ineffectual. Agents are barely phased by them, so the fundamental gameplay loop of building out your base with a complex series of interlocking death traps is underwhelming. Instead, when agents enter my base, I'm just constantly hitting the "High Alert" button and hoping my minions can eventually wander over and kill/capture them without suffering too many casualties. Maybe it gets better later, but still - I'm 12 hours into the game and even low level agents just wander past my strongest traps and my minions rarely seem to react unless explicitly ordered to (despite having multiple security posts/cameras/etc).
The world map content is also incredibly bland and uninteresting - once I had enough regions unlocked for a decent amount of passive income, I stopped using it except to do assigned quest missions and occasionally reduce my heat level. One of my biggest problems with the world map missions is that any minions you send out are lost forever. While I get that your minions are supposed to be disposable henchmen, it completely undermines the sense of progress you get from training them, protecting them from enemy agents, leveling them up, etc. It'd be much more interesting to have fewer world map missions with better, more complex rewards, and then couple that with minions returning from successful missions.
Evil Genius 2 isn't terrible, but it's not very good either. There are a number of core design decisions that need a serious overhaul just to bring it up to par with the classics of the genre (including the original Evil Genius), which is sad when you consider most of those games are 20+ years old now.
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