Base building games are slowly becoming a niche of their own. What started with Prison Architect, and Dungeon Keeper before that, is slowly branching out in different directions to create new and ever more interesting titles.  MachiaVillain finds the player building an ever more complex mansion in hopes of climbing the league of villains to gain more and more influence and all the perks that brings.  Wearing its inspiration all over there are worst designs and things to take after than what MachiaVillian has chosen, sadly it starts to fall apart when it tries to walk on its own.

The world the game takes place in seems to function under the impression that every horror movie that has ever been takes place in the same universe, and as an up and coming bad-guy it is the players job to take their selected minors and lure the innocent into more and more elaborately designed death traps.  From the start of the game the tone is spot on, the way everything feels is genuine.  The game feels more like a labor of love than a quick cash grab and designing mansions can quickly become “five more minutes” affairs that last for hours—much the same way that classic Civ games did.

This labor of love, sadly, become true labor after several ranks are gained in the league as more and more requirements are added to progress.  This ranges from creating the next item in the mansion, to the next rank in the league; many times the only real solution to the problem will to be simply grind away at resources or a simple task for a prolonged period of time until the goal is met, and then move onto another strangely high and impossible task that needs to be taken care of.  This is also ignoring that some of the minions do randomly seem to dump AI for no reason as well, making it a chore at times to micromanage large and larger complexes.

Gillman and Squall play through the opening segments of MachiaVillian. Enjoy the stream below:

It isn’t that the first hour or two of gameplay is enjoyable, as the act of building the base of the mansion is a great deal of fun.  Several times while progressing through the game I restarted to build another creation based on things that I had learned from the previous structure.  The problem, always, came back to the grind that was present after a certain point regardless of how well designed the floor plan was.  It just seemed like there was no escaping it.

MachiaVillain isn’t a bad game, the problem is that it is a deeply flawed game that may or may not get the attention that it needs to fix the imbalances that present in the gameplay.  The game has recently launched and all of these problems are still front and center, which make it difficult to recommend the game to anyone but the most extreme and diehard fans of this incredibly niche genre.  Possibly in a couple of months, and a handful of patches, that story can change, but I don’t know if I would hold my breath for it.