Middle Manager of Justice
IOS
A Double Fine game? Yes please! For free? Double Yes! Freemium? Erm... Ok!?
Middle Manager of Justice is the latest game from Double Fine's Amnesia Fortnight
and the companies first foray into the freemium market. Does it move up the corporate ladder, or does it need to be future endeavoured?
The answer is... it's stuck in probation.
The look of the game is instantly appealing, invoking the style of The Incredibles and 1960's Hanna Barbera cartoons, and maintains it's charm all the way through until it's end with sly commentary on gaming culture and superhero tropes. It's just a shame that the gameplay struggles to match up to the stylish presentation. As a newly appointed manager for Justice Corp, it is your job to hire, train and send your superheroes out to fight crime, as well as research new technologies that make your heroes tougher, stronger and cleverer, as well as health packs and stat boosters in the battle against crime.
As your team of heroes expands and upgrade their skills, so does your office, requiring you to buy and improve your rooms and facilities, offering places for your crime fighters to heal up after cleaning the streets, places to train, places to research new tech and even join the rat race to earn more money for the company.
All these tasks take time, starting off quick but developing into hour long waits towards the endgame. As Middle Manager of Justice is a freemium game, you can speed things up using Superium, which can earn by completing certain events or via IAP. Not once throughout my career doling out beat downs to hired goons did I feel the need or requirement to have to buy any Superium, in fact I ended up up 65 chunks of Superium left once I had "completed" the campaign, alongside a vast wad of cash. The other main form of currency in MMoJ is the coins you receive after delivering justice as well as getting your supers to do some office work. With these coins you can purchase new costumes for your heroes, new equipment for you rooms and new health and stat restoring items. At the end of the campaign, although the game can continue, just without any story trappings, I had amassed enough coins to make Scrooge McDuck drool.
The game is generous in handing out rewards and as such makes it a welcome break from the majority of freemium games that hide a good chunk of the content behind a pay wall, I'm looking at you The Simpsons Tapped Out...
When MMoJ was first revealed I had hoped it would be more along the Theme Hospital / Dungeon Keeper line of things, I suppose that freemium is the way that the management sims are going to entice people to download them, but I would have preferred an approach closer to the Kairosoft sim.
Middle Manager of Justice is a good freemium game, but a disappointing management sim, with a lack of depth and a reliance on time management to try and encourage you to spend to speed things up. If there was more to spend your Superium on beyond the ability to hire levelled up heroes, who are basically the same as the starter heroes but without the hours put in, then MMoJ could have been a lot more interesting, but once you have your 4 heroes, you can hire more but only have 4 active at once, I found myself sticking with them and nurturing my chosen 4. If your extra heroes could be assigned to earn you extra coins while your main 4 head out to clean the mean streets, which means that any task they are currently undertaking is interrupted, then it would encourage the player to spend and in turn buy more Superium, but the way the game is balanced there is no need to, as you'll earn more than enough to keep you going.
Hopefully Double Fine can tweak things with updates, which appear to be coming from inaccessible areas on the map, but as it is, once you have your troop of crime fighters, things are set on a long, no frills campaign against a gallery of rogues, it's mildly fun and offers up plenty of humorous moments and scenarios, but a journey that feels as middle of the road and hollow as a corporate party in the office during work time that you'll have to work back, just as long as the office joker turns up after a liquid lunch.
6/10
IOS
A Double Fine game? Yes please! For free? Double Yes! Freemium? Erm... Ok!?
Middle Manager of Justice is the latest game from Double Fine's Amnesia Fortnight
and the companies first foray into the freemium market. Does it move up the corporate ladder, or does it need to be future endeavoured?
The answer is... it's stuck in probation.
The look of the game is instantly appealing, invoking the style of The Incredibles and 1960's Hanna Barbera cartoons, and maintains it's charm all the way through until it's end with sly commentary on gaming culture and superhero tropes. It's just a shame that the gameplay struggles to match up to the stylish presentation. As a newly appointed manager for Justice Corp, it is your job to hire, train and send your superheroes out to fight crime, as well as research new technologies that make your heroes tougher, stronger and cleverer, as well as health packs and stat boosters in the battle against crime.
As your team of heroes expands and upgrade their skills, so does your office, requiring you to buy and improve your rooms and facilities, offering places for your crime fighters to heal up after cleaning the streets, places to train, places to research new tech and even join the rat race to earn more money for the company.
All these tasks take time, starting off quick but developing into hour long waits towards the endgame. As Middle Manager of Justice is a freemium game, you can speed things up using Superium, which can earn by completing certain events or via IAP. Not once throughout my career doling out beat downs to hired goons did I feel the need or requirement to have to buy any Superium, in fact I ended up up 65 chunks of Superium left once I had "completed" the campaign, alongside a vast wad of cash. The other main form of currency in MMoJ is the coins you receive after delivering justice as well as getting your supers to do some office work. With these coins you can purchase new costumes for your heroes, new equipment for you rooms and new health and stat restoring items. At the end of the campaign, although the game can continue, just without any story trappings, I had amassed enough coins to make Scrooge McDuck drool.
The game is generous in handing out rewards and as such makes it a welcome break from the majority of freemium games that hide a good chunk of the content behind a pay wall, I'm looking at you The Simpsons Tapped Out...
When MMoJ was first revealed I had hoped it would be more along the Theme Hospital / Dungeon Keeper line of things, I suppose that freemium is the way that the management sims are going to entice people to download them, but I would have preferred an approach closer to the Kairosoft sim.
Middle Manager of Justice is a good freemium game, but a disappointing management sim, with a lack of depth and a reliance on time management to try and encourage you to spend to speed things up. If there was more to spend your Superium on beyond the ability to hire levelled up heroes, who are basically the same as the starter heroes but without the hours put in, then MMoJ could have been a lot more interesting, but once you have your 4 heroes, you can hire more but only have 4 active at once, I found myself sticking with them and nurturing my chosen 4. If your extra heroes could be assigned to earn you extra coins while your main 4 head out to clean the mean streets, which means that any task they are currently undertaking is interrupted, then it would encourage the player to spend and in turn buy more Superium, but the way the game is balanced there is no need to, as you'll earn more than enough to keep you going.
Hopefully Double Fine can tweak things with updates, which appear to be coming from inaccessible areas on the map, but as it is, once you have your troop of crime fighters, things are set on a long, no frills campaign against a gallery of rogues, it's mildly fun and offers up plenty of humorous moments and scenarios, but a journey that feels as middle of the road and hollow as a corporate party in the office during work time that you'll have to work back, just as long as the office joker turns up after a liquid lunch.
6/10