Mob Rule

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Review: Mob Rule

Imagine Settlers III set in the Roaring Twenties, and you'll have some sense of what Mob Rule is all about. In this realtime strategy game, your Godfather provides you with a narrow set of goals through approximately thirty separate missions spread over five successively more difficult cities. But Settlers III was easy to learn and play. By contrast, Mob Rule is confusing to understand, and not really worth the effort.

The gameplay recalls Theme Hospital in its meticulous micro-management. You have to juggle dozens of events that occur simultaneously in frenetic real-time and never stop. You buy land, create and upgrade several kinds of businesses, attract tenants and deal with their ongoing problems, balance building resources, track 20 types of manufactured objects, produce the gang units (workers, fixers, gangsters) you need at the moment, bribe the police, pay your taxes, capture clients, extend your territory, perform tasks for your Godfather and counter the efforts by enemy families to build their own businesses, kill your gang members, and destroy or takeover portions of your turf.

Whew.

A speed control lets you slow things down, but only to a moderate pace which is still likely to befuddle new and slightly experienced players. (You can pause the game, but not give orders while it's paused.)

Any number of standard features from other resource management games would have made Mob Rule easier to play, but the game's developers seem to have gone out of their way to make it difficult. A building queue isn't provided, so you have to manually round up your workers and send them to each site. Your gang members won't go to your hospital if they've been badly hurt. You have to send them yourself and retrieve them later. Hotkeys are too few, and the interface buttons to perform various tasks are too small for easy activation while you're concentrating on a gangland killing.

The documentation is just inadequate. Want to know how you can acquire a higher class of tenant into your properties? So do I. We're never told. You don't even know that you can take over an enemy's building until the tutorial tells you to do so. The manual doesn't mention that, either, and neither the tutorial nor the documentation tell you how.

Trial-and-error isn't my idea of fun.

Mob Rule supports LAN-based network play for up to four players. There are no missions, just a free-for-all combination of expansion and destruction--which the game's designers would have been wise to make available as a stand-alone option as well.

I had great hopes for Mob Rule. The silliness and stylishness of its graphics are instantly appealing, and the AI makes for a challenging opponent. But the lack of basic information, coupled with an abundance of unnecessary micro-management, mean a low return on your investment in time and energy. This is a potentially very good game that really shoots itself in the foot.-- Barry Brenesal / GamePro