Double Fine has produced the only other iOS game (the first being Tiny Tower) that has me glued to either my iPhone or iPad in an almost constant fashion.
Just in case you’ve missed this free app from Double Fine, Middle Manager of Justice has you building up a superhero base from scratch in order to fight crime throughout the surrounding areas of the city. Starting with just the middle manager and one superhero (from a choice of three), you have to build up your base by fighting crime, earning money and levelling up. You can level up both your manager and the superheroes, and in doing so you can send them off for more training, add more rooms to your office building, acquire more superheroes and of course fight bigger and badder villains.
So that’s the basic idea, pick up some jobs and start levelling. Some jobs are just straightforward: go in and defeat the villain(s). You will be given a brief summary of what you are up against when you select an event from the map, along with a percentage chance of victory. Other jobs will require just one hero, but that hero must have a certain value of intelligence (Fire Rescue), or strength (Bus Rescue) to guarantee success. You can of course send sub-par heroes in and take your chances.
During the combat you can choose to use each heroes special abilities, along with any abilities your manager has gained, and even powerups that you can buy from the store, so even if things get a bit hairy you have lots of backup options you can turn to.
You can have a maximum of 4 active heroes, though if you wanted to you could buy them all and swap them in and out as you please. Heroes can be ranged or melee, so you can try out various combinations to see what works best for you.
Each superhero will start with different stats, but regardless of who you pick you can level up weaker stats, or strengthen the strongest ones even more, or just try to make an all round type. The choice is entirely yours, provided you have the equipment to do so. You can choose to do a Power Workout to increase power, a Cardio Workout to increase the heroes maximum health (both done in the gym) or you can send the hero off for Employee Training with the manager to increase their intelligence.
When heroes come back from events they will gain XP and once they get enough XP they can get a promotion and will have access to three more training sessions.
Building a research lab will enable each hero to go and improve their special abilities. Each hero has three abilities, but you can only have one active at a time.
I got my manager to level ten fairly quickly, but am still working on getting a full team of superheroes to max level (which I also assume is 10). Of course because you can swap out heroes, levelling up all of your heroes could take some time. I feel only slightly disappointed that all the hard work my superheroes goes through won’t upgrade my manager anymore. Perhaps Double Fine can increase the level cap in future update. Of course you can still continue to upgrade all the additional rooms and each station within the rooms too.
You can purchase items from the shop to equip your heroes with. You can also buy consumables to use during battle, as mentioned before, to either restore health or add some other effect during gameplay. What would a superhero game be without costumes? Well fear not, you can buy new costumes for your heroes too, and of course you can buy more heroes.
With the sim management, rpg style upgrading and the battles themselves there are enough aspects to this game to keep it varied. If you want to just focus on levelling up skills or research for a while then you can choose to ignore what’s going on around the city and do that, though that doesn’t make the citizens of these cities happy, nor does it bring in the money, but the game doesn’t penalise you for choosing that. If you want to smack up some villains then just keep going out and do that until you have exhausted all your superheroes, give them some rest then send them back out again.
The caricature-style graphics suit this title well and complement the humour found within the dialogue between the heroes and the villains during each battle, which often left me chuckling.
There are just so many ways that Double Fine could expand on this gem, and from the looks of the forums on their official site they are taking the ideas that people are throwing so hopefully we shall see some super updates soon.
Middle Manager of Justice is free and brilliant, it’s a must have!
8 heroic heroes of heroism out of 10