You’ll never get me, ya dirty coppers! Review

You’ll never get me, ya dirty coppers!

How does this sound for a plot: You, as a (ahem) business partner of

the Godfather, are given a city to create your empire, build up your own businesses,

and generally wreak havoc with the city’s police force. Sound fun? With a concept

this cool, it’s too bad that Mob Rule is one offer you can refuse.

Mob Rule

walks a different path than most games by combining two genres: Real Time Strategy

and City Simulation. The Simulation part has you buying land to build on, building

structures, and assigning a tenant to live in each building. The tenant can

either make money for you or breed workers for your organization (if there’s

only one person in each building, how do they breed?). The Strategy portion

involves creating gangsters to kill people (yours or theirs) and destroy or

capture your opponent’s buildings.

First off, the game looks and sounds exactly as it should. All the backgrounds

and settings are done in a mid-30’s gangster style, with the buildings looking

like they were ripped straight from the past. From drinking halls to flop houses

to brothels, everything looks perfect. All of your characters are cartoony stereotypes:

the workers are big and dumb, while the gangsters are thin and slick looking.

Even the voices have a hilarious Brooklyn accent (it’s cool when you hear the

fixers say “My respects, Godfather”).

There are lots of little things that make this game entertaining. For every

person, building, or action, there’s a little video that plays in the lower

corner. When you’re building a structure, it shows a worker getting hit with

a pipe, and when you look inside an infested building, you see some really creepy

bugs. The multitude of things to manipulate make the gameplay interesting. You

can buy off the police station to give you police protection, buy off other

gangs to get some peace, put dead bodies in front of your enemies buildings

to get the police to harass them, or even send out thugs to kidnap members of

the other team. Fun for the whole (crime) family.

With all these

good things, it’s a downright shame that Mob Rule doesn’t quite make

the cut. The problem isn’t what the designers didn’t try, but that the combination

of RTS and Simulation turns into an ugly mess, mixing up the worst aspects of

the two genres.

In a strategy game, you want predictability. You want to know exactly how much

gold it takes to build a dragon and how long it will take to make it. You want

to know that, while you go off to seek more crystals, your temple wont stop

working unless the enemy blows it up.

But in Mob Rule, all of these normally static values are variable. The

amount of money you get from each building depends on the mood of the tenant,

the land value, the number of people who come in, and so on. The rate of worker

production depends on how many children the tenant has had and whether or not

the building is on fire (which happens more often then you’d think). Your tenants

can die behind your back, forcing you to quickly find a replacement of some

sort. In a normal simulation game, all of these things are welcome additions,

adding more depth to the gameplay, but in a RTS game, it’s just too much to

think about at one time. I found myself downright confused at several points,

wondering how the heck to get out of my current situation.

There are two more minor things that hurt the quality of Mob Rule. First,

the control system is confusing. It looks sort of like a combination of SimCity

3000 and Starcraft,

but without capturing the simplicity of either. Secondly, you can’t start a

game without going into the tutorial first. I know that the average person needs

some practice at the game before they dive in, but I have the right to get completely

confused if I want!

Although the developers tried hard to come up with a high quality game, their

attempt to blend RTS and Sim games just didn’t pan out. What we get is an overly

complex and confusing game, with lots of fun little parts. If you have plenty

of patience and a brain that works faster than the speed of concrete shoes falling

off a bridge (or really like the idea of building a crime empire), then

you may like this game. Otherwise, pick either a RTS game or a simulation and

buy that instead.