Having finally beaten this pile of crap I can (with full confidence) say, don't buy it.

This game takes everything that made the first unique, fun and downright funny and completely half-arses it (at best). It is horribly repetitive, the agents/super agents are a joke, there's absolutely no reason to do a second playthrough as a different character because it's linear. Minions have traits which are worthless and do nothing, which is sad because that would've made them more unique and gives them an edge in/out of combat. Although the trait system is worthless anyway because when you send your minions on missions they don't return, which is annoying because all the time invested in training them ends up being redundant. The first one had this system right, because unlike in this game there were threats that could kill your minions before the mission was complete. What have we got to worry about in this one? Nothing. The super agents in the first game were no joke, when they appeared you were absolutely in trouble, heck even when prepared they'd take down a decent amount of your minions and could permanently kill your henchmen. No need to worry about any of that in this dumbed down mess, I missed having the variety of weapons to outfit your minions with too. Melee weapons are a great addition, although you just get two types with two variants. Lethal/stun club, along with a lethal/stun staff. It's the same with ranged weaponry, it's utterly boring and a complete missed opportunity that it wasn't expanded on.
I guess one positive is the build management system, I was quite impressed with the mechanics behind that but... that's about it.

Do yourself a favour, buy the first Evil Genius and see why people love it so much.

Having finally beaten this pile of crap I can (with full confidence) say, don't buy it. This game takes everything that made the first unique, fun and downright funny and completely half-arses it (at best). It is horribly repetitive, the agents/super agents are a joke, there's absolutely no reason to do a second playthrough as a different character because it's linear. Minions have traits which are worthless and do nothing, which is sad because that would've made them more unique and gives them an edge in/out of combat. Although the trait system is worthless anyway because when you send your minions on missions they don't return, which is annoying because all the time invested in training them ends up being redundant. The first one had this system right, because unlike in this game there were threats that could kill your minions before the mission was complete. What have we got to worry about in this one? Nothing. The super agents in the first game were no joke, when they appeared you were absolutely in trouble, heck even when prepared they'd take down a decent amount of your minions and could permanently kill your henchmen. No need to worry about any of that in this dumbed down mess, I missed having the variety of weapons to outfit your minions with too. Melee weapons are a great addition, although you just get two types with two variants. Lethal/stun club, along with a lethal/stun staff. It's the same with ranged weaponry, it's utterly boring and a complete missed opportunity that it wasn't expanded on. I guess one positive is the build management system, I was quite impressed with the mechanics behind that but... that's about it. Do yourself a favour, buy the first Evil Genius and see why people love it so much.