Mob Rule: Platinum Edition

The Good
This game definitely has a lot of adult humor. Some of the units are: Fifi the Hooker (yes, prostitute), Bruno the Nutter (who goes wacko and whacks people with his cleaver)... Not your typical RTS units. The cops can be bought, the city can be bribed, the enemy gang can be bribed... And bodies can be hidden with a funeral yard.

The Bad
Too many structures and too many upgrades. Instead of just research to upgrade a structure, you need to build a "gadget factory" to produce the item(s) needed to upgrade a building. The resources are also MANUFACTURED with specfic structures, which requires workers. You must create workers by "breeding" them with buildings and tenants, but you also need to breed tenants as replacements, AND some of the tenents must make money to keep your business afloat. This turns into a true vicious circle as there are just too many things to keep track at one time. All this building management occurs WHILE you try to fight off enemy encroachments AND try to fulfill specific scenario objectives. It's just too many things to juggle at a time.

The Bottom Line
Mob Rule is an RTS that tries to have a sense of humor with the "mobster" theme. The characters are all caricatures that look like half way between claymation figures and cartoon characters.

You start with a few workers and a budget. Use the workers to build factories to manufacture resources (bricks, cement, and steel), build structures, upgrade structures, man factories, carry items from one location to another, and be converted into fixers or gangsters...

The structures can be used to generate more money, breed more tenants, or breed more workers. You need to match the tenent to the type of structure to optimize productivity, and you need workers for all the uses above.

In the meanwhile, you need to fight off enemy encroachments, such as enemy fixers trying to take over your buildings, enemy gangsters trying to take out your units, enemy special units trying to sabotage your operation, and police, who's always watching for obvious misdeeds. If your unit killed someone in sight of police your unit will be arrested and put in jail for a while.

In the midst of all these, you also need to pay up annual bribes to city hall, pay up bribes to police to stay away from your money making business, buy police protection by paying for "police beacons" that will attract police patrols, buy feneral yards to hide enemy bodies, and much more.

You also get special units that have special uses, like distract police, steal resources, posses enemy units, torch enemy buildings, and such, but you need to build special structures to use them (which of course takes more resources and more workers).

The game is composed of 5 cities, each of which has ten objectives to achieve, ranging from building a certain structure with certain improvements to kill certain enemy units. The ultimate goal is to destroy the enemy HQ.

The game as RTS is simply too fast with too many things to juggle. There are just too many interlinking aspects of the game that pulls in all different directions in real-time. You need to simultaneously balance production of tenants, workers, and revenue, while build structures like SimCity, build improvements, watch worker productivity, turn surplus workers into fixers and gangsters, fight enemy units, AND fulfill the objectives. I feel more frustrated and lost than having fun with the humor.