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With C&C: Tiberian Sun appearing in the same month, one would not expect a more intriguing real-time strategy game to come from the publisher of such CD-ROM titles as The Girlfriends' Guide to Teen Pregnancy and My Teacher is an Alien. But nevertheless, Simon & Schuster Interactive has hit paydirt with its investment in British developer Studio 3, the outfit behind the entertaining Mob Rule.
Mob Rule (formerly known as Street Wars) is basically just a remake of the overlooked Constructor, and could be mistaken for its forebear at a glance. The basics are rooted firmly in SimCity territory; you play from an isometric, God's-eye view of the city, and your concerns include construction, urban development, and municipal government.
The twist here is that you're a mafia captain, and your aim has nothing to do with the betterment of society - you're in a race for cash and power, and you'll stop at nothing to carve out a criminal empire from the humblest of beginnings. You start out in low-rent Hick Town and then advance to colonize such cheery locales as Cripple's Bend, Dead Dog Ditch, and ultimately the bright lights of Capitol City.
Gameplay is a constantly entertaining balance of nuts-and-bolts micromanagement and savagely funny mob mayhem. You build your empire by buying run-down city blocks and constructing buildings for tenant lease or businesses. Cement works, brothels, funeral parlors, and the like provide income as well as an endless stream of black humor (a recurring joke, typical of the game's fiendish sense of humor, involves filling your soup kitchens and bars with a supply of drunken Wasters whose alcoholism is treated as a resource to exploit). Building gadget factories allows you to produce items like ovens to upgrade soup kitchens into cash-producing diners, while tenants "breed" new workers for your goombah labor force. Workers can be transformed into specialty units like the Fixer, who does maintenance work on your crumbling buildings, or Gangsters, who can be sent into battle against rival mafioso.
There seems to be no end to the devious, tongue-in-cheek laughs. One cruelly effective tactic is to murder enemy workers and then drag their corpses into the enemy's tenant houses. After a while, the corpses produce bug infestations, and the house can't be used anymore. (Corpses keep cropping up in gameplay; your perpetual need to dispose of bodies creates all kinds of hilarious hassle. Eventually, you just have to construct a cemetery to get rid of all your "evidence.") When your goons get arrested, you can subvert a church and use the Priest to negotiate a commuting of their sentences. You can take over pool halls to produce a uniquely virulent strain of hoodlum who specialize in kidnapping. It's all so deliciously evil. And of course, panic is the order of the day whenever one of the Godfather's cousins comes to visitif anything happens to them, you're a grease spot, so your total attention is focused on keeping the guy out of harm's way despite the fact that you still have an empire to run.
As satisfying and funny as Mob Rule, there are some long stretches of tedium. While there are always new, unique assignments coming your way from the Godfather, the mechanics of your operation are more or less identical in each new city. This makes for a lot of repetitious busy work when it comes to breeding workers, building rudimentary buildings, and coping with cash flow problems. The game also throws an avalanche of mundane catastrophes at you - you're forced to spend way too much time fighting the dozens of random tenement fires that flare up.
Mob Rule may not be the slickest strategy game on the block, but its strong design and monstrous humor show us what Eidos' disappointingly dull Gangsters should have been, and make it one of the most fun RTSs in a good, long time. Maybe crime does pay after all.