In my quest to go back and play all the great old games that I missed in my formative years before I became a dedicated gamer, one thing has become clear to me: people have been making fantastic games for a really long time.

Evil Genius is an excellent example of this. I mean seriously – in how many games do you get to play an evil mastermind looking to take over the world?

The game does its best to play on every spy fiction cliche available, from henchmen with superpowers to building an underground lair in a volcano. You choose to play as one of three evil geniuses, each with their own special ability that won’t actually affect gameplay all that much.

The game plays like an RTS. As the evil genius, you of course aren’t required to do any of the dirty work of conquering the world. In fact, 90 percent of the time you’ll have your character just sit around somewhere safe while your minions and henchmen do all the work. Cue maniacal laughter and evil hand wringing.

Minions make up the bulk of your evil force. You’ll start out with basic construction workers, who you’ll eventually be able to train up into more specialized classes to do more specialized jobs. You can’t directly control your minions, but can only give them general orders that will guide them. For example, when your base comes under attack by the forces of justice, you can’t select your soldiers and tell them to defend. But you can build security cameras that will detect the enemies and loudspeakers that will announce their presence, which will then cause your soldiers to run to the enemies’ location and do battle.

It’s a roundabout way of doing things, and there are times when it can be downright infuriating (watching an enemy super agent destroy half your base while your guards are all tooling around another room because you forgot to build a proper security system is maddening). Once you learn how to make it tick, however, it works.

The ultimate goal of the game is to take over the world, and as you might imagine, this will take an extremely long time. Depending on difficulty level and a few other factors, getting to the endgame can take anywhere between 50 and 100 hours. This isn’t helped by the game’s pacing, which is so slow that at times you can get up from the computer and go make yourself a snack without too much fear of hell breaking loose.

In terms of content, there aren’t too many concerns. The overall theme of the game, of course, is doing campy evil deeds to take over the world, which might strike some as problematic. This is handled in such a tongue-in-cheek sort of a way, however, that it doesn’t raise a red flag for me. Other concerns are mild violent content (the worst of which is probably interrogating enemy prisoners, but even this is largely inane and slapstick).

Mild language pops up now and again; one enemy super agent traipses around in a bikini, but the graphics in this game are old school enough that it’s not really a concern.

Overall, the game is not for everyone. If you have a short attention span, Evil Genius will turn you off quickly. If you hate micro-management, you’ll want to look elsewhere. But if you’re searching for a strategy game that will force you to think outside the box and give you a few laughs while you’re at it, Evil Genius may be what you’re after.

Jerod Jarvis is an independent gaming journalist and founder of Duality Games. He maintains gaming columns for The Washington Times Communities and for The Outpost. When not blogging madly about games, he freelances for the Spokesman-Review in his hometown of Spokane, Washington and attends school at Whitworth University. Check out his presence on Facebook and Twitter to stay up on Duality Games updates and the inside scoop on the gaming news you care about.