MachiaVillain review: Unleash your evil genius in this murder mansion .

The game and its format is simple enough, all you have to do is hire a bunch of minions to do your evil bidding, build a house from the ground up, lure unsuspecting humans and then kill them all off once they arrive.

Players are encouraged to get creative with this as the more blood you shed, the higher your evil villain prestige grows.

MachiaVillain is primarily a game about remembering to sweep severed heads off your porch. Too much visible viscera will scare off the next crop of guileless victims to your hand-crafted house of horrors, y’see. Shamelessly in the tradition of Dungeon Keeper (still my go-to PC gaming nostalgia, along with X-COM), MachiaVillain is a management sim in which the baddies are the goodies. You shepherd a small herd of flesh-eating monsters around, building both an ever-growing lair for themselves and a faux-home to lure in unsuspecting humies with which to feed your festering menagerie.

It runs much further with its inverted horror movie concept than does the usual “ooh, what if you were the bad guy, eh?” tomfoolery, though witless humour and a needlessly fiddly user interface get in the way of the gruesome good times.

The story of MachiaVillain is a nice simple one, you were once a minion yourself who worked for an evil boss who used you as his slave as you killed for him and were forced to even clean up after yourselves! You strived for more, YOU wanted to be the boss and you knew you had the skills to become better than an entry-level evil minion. One night, an owl flew into your window carrying a letter address to you! What could this be? Upon killing the adorable owl, you realise that you have been summoned to the Department of Evil Domains, from the League of Machiavellian Villains, in order to receive a plot of evil land to erect your own evil mansion upon. This is a nightmare come true! You grab your things, and the last toilet roll from your ex-bosses toilet, and head off to claim your land!

You arrive at the Department and thus begins your wait. A wait which will take many, many years as you watch all of the others before you crumble into dust and rot away. Eventually, you are finally in possession of your own Deed! You are given a plot of land and three minions to begin with and the Evil Machiavellian League of Villans gives you a probation period to pass a few specific quests (basically the tutorial).

That’s about it for the story and the narrative as the game is now all up to you. It’s basically an endless open sandbox where you must see how far you can go until all of your minions are defeated and you have nobody left to serve you. This is all whilst appeasing the League by completing their ‘rank’ quests in order to obtain new minions and bonus payments. I don’t usually play open-ended games as I much prefer games with a set narrative and goals, yet MachiaVillains has something about it which had me addicted for just over 12 hours straight! Plus I haven’t even really got to the in-depth parts of the game yet!

If you have ever played Prison Architect before, imagine that but with mummies, zombies, killer clowns and vampires instead of guards, and the food delivery trucks as regular human beings. If you haven’t played or seen that game before, this game is a building and resource management sim with very precise micro-management options so that you can plan out and ensure everything is working exactly how you want it too.

Let’s begin with your minions, as you were once one so you know how to command them right? Well, kind of. The minions you will be getting aren’t full of free will like you, they are braindead and empty on the inside. They won’t do anything at all unless you tell them too, which can be both a good and a bad thing. You can initially pick up to three to join your team, all of which have different ‘skills’ yet they can all level these up in-game anyway so the traits are the important part. Some of them are lazy and move slower, some are more resistive to various status effects, and some are faster at working. Once you’ve grabbed your initial motley crew, you must assign them roles…

Even though they are braindead, your minions will act on their own once given a task. For example, if you pick the role of ‘supply gatherer’ then that minion will run around picking up any logs, rocks, dead bodies etc and placing them in any storage chambers you build. However, if you tell someone to chop wood or mine stone, they won’t do anything unless you have first plotted out which area to mine or chop. You can also allocate minions to certain rooms – so you may have a chef/butcher which chops up the bodies yet also has the task of cleaning up, so that he washes the floor afterwards. One thing to take in here is that you can’t select an infinite amount of tasks, each minion is different and can have from 2-5 tasks selected at a time, so you need to ensure you have everything covered. You can also change the priority of each task with each person as well – did I mention there is a lot of micro-management?

Once your little guys and gals are defined, it onto the fun part – building your mansion. Okay, so looking at images online of other peoples buildings, I’ve gone for the minimalist style and I’ve not really embraced everything you can do yet, as mine looks more like a collection of porta-cabins rather than a mansion! But that’s the fun of it, you play, learn, then start again only this time you make it better. The building is simple though, each room must have four walls and a floor plus at least one door – that’s it. Then, you place various ‘room specific’ items within a room in order to give it its role. For example, if you drop a bed into a room then it becomes a bedroom, a table will be a kitchen and a TV will become a victims room. You do have a few non-specific items as well such as the storage containers which can go anywhere you want them to be – I tended to put them near the room/item which needed those resources the most.

You initially have the ability to build pretty much every room type, providing you have the right amount of resources, but you won’t be able to build the ‘advanced’ parts of these rooms until you have done some research. By ‘advanced’ parts I mean a secondary crafting table or extra accessories. For example, in the kitchen you can research and build a fridge and a smoker in order to preserve the food longer (otherwise it rots after a few days), the factory gets a new unit which can make other resources for building, and the office can gain a PC or printing press for bigger victim enticements. Even though the options here aren’t quite as diverse as I would have hoped, with only a few room types on offer, I never grew bored in my entire 12 hours of playing as I was constantly moving things around and making myself more efficient and better at what I was doing. This brings me to the main aspect of the game…

That’s a lot of blood! I’ve just chopped up about 4 bodies in a row

It’s so much fun killing men, women, fathers, mothers, children and virgins (who isn’t always the child surprisingly). At first, you don’t really have any means to kill other than jumping out and beating the crap out of everyone who steps foot into your mansion and then serving their head on a platter. You can’t risk the humans seeing you though, so just before they arrive, you must stop your current jobs (via a handy button) and move everyone out of sight into a hidden room or behind trees. If you are spotted, they may try and make a run for it or call for help

However, as you gain more resources and become more comfortable with the game, you can make murder rooms. These are called ‘victim’ rooms and are there for you to entice the civilians to stay and ignore all the death going on around them. From having a TV for them to watch so they don’t see you taking out their friends behind them, to a jacuzzi for them to relax in and call their friends in order to lower the suspicion of the venue before you kill them. It’s all fun.

Later on, you can also get more advanced traps set up, such as paintings on the wall which rotate as someone is looking at them in order to push the unsuspecting viewer to their death on a custom-built conveyor belt inside the walls. Again, the variety is limited in what you can and can’t do, but there is enough to have fun with it and see what works best for you. I would love it if they either added more items or even allowed Steam Workshop so that the community could provide their own traps and accessories. You also receive more experience points if you follow the simple horror story rules, such as kill them on their own, don’t let anyone live, kill the virgin last, and never kill the dog. So, if you have Virgin Detectors and a fire hydrant for the dog, then you can skillfully plan all of your deaths in order to get the best possible score.

The game can basically be as complicated and deep, or easy and basic, as you want it to be.

There are two things I’ve not really touched on yet and that’s the resources and how to get more. There are six resources you can collect from the moderately sized map, Wood, Evil Wood, Stone, Gold, Metal, and fruit/mushrooms. The wood is from trees which grow back over time, even inside of your mansion for some reason, the Evil Wood comes from Evil Trees which come back at a much slower rate, the Stone, Gold and Metal comes from non-respawning rocks, and the fruit is randomly re-spawning. So, the question is, what do you do when you have exhausted the map of all of its stone and metal? There isn’t a role to plant/create more and there isn’t an item that offers infinite amounts of mining. At the moment, you have two options. Either start a new game (which would be annoying) or buy them from a merchant.

The merchants will randomly show up, or you can call them on your phone to come at any time. They sell things for almost rip-off prices, but if you need them then it’s the only option. Plus, by the time you get to the stage where you have nothing to mine, you should be rolling in gold! These merchants will not only sell resources, but some will sell food (such as brains and blood) as well as new minions and captured humans. One even sells you up to 20 rotting corpses, although he always seems to drive over the ones he drops off, thus auto-destroying about 10-13 of them every single time!

As you progress and begin to go up through the ranks of the League, you will also unlock new minion slots. I made the mistake and instantly filled them all up every single time I got one – that’s great if you have a constant flow of fresh humans to slaughter, but if not then they just end up eating all your food, so you have to be strategic. If you don’t have enough food then your minions get upset and start smashing up your rooms and the items within – and you don’t want that to happen!