Mobsters: Criminal Empires, is a competitive city management game, with elements of player versus player, city building and real-time strategy. The game offers you a decent tutorial in which you will learn the basics of city building and your resources, in addition to the combat elements.
The main screen of the city of this game has buildings distributed by blocks. You can build and recruit gang members to launch strikes and claim these buildings for yourself! With a town hall and its upgrade, you can move buildings for a more strategic setup, or take control of abandoned buildings to increase the fog of war in your city, discovering more buildings to take and hold!
This game has 3 main resources, the muscle, which is used to recruit units of your gang members. Coins are used to upgrade buildings, defenses, and upgrade your avatar with stronger clothing and weaponry! Finally, the product is used in the construction of building improvements and in the purchase of defenses for your city! There are various types of buildings in this game, and resource buildings give you a certain amount of a certain type, like sweatshops that give you product and gyms that give you muscle. Other special buildings are also needed, such as storage buildings, which increase the amount of the 3 resources you can store at once, prison yard to recruit units, housing to store gang members, shooting ranges and buildings. for gang members to upgrade your units to higher levels and get stronger!
Influence is another special resource, only obtained from friends and gifts they send, or by visiting their cities and upgrading them. Influence can be used to store troops in the subway or speed up the production of most items and repairs if your city has been attacked.
Your avatar is your own special unit that you can send into battle to help your units fight in invasions and defense, and buying them new clothes and weapons will increase their power and defense! Stamina is the only resource the avatar uses and will recharge over time, but the more powerful it becomes, the more stamina it uses for each deployment. Your avatar can also carry special tools and grenades that it can use in combat to deal damage to units and buildings, or heal him and his equipment, and other special uses.
The combat in this game has something of a real-time strategy (RTS) element, in which you can deploy units outside the enemy city borders. Each unit has its own preference for building types and acts on its own, but you can choose its spawn location and personally control your avatar if you deploy it in battle. Destroying buildings will allow you to steal resources from them, and destroying enemy bases is usually the main objective, but taking good loot from rivals is not a bad idea either!
As you upgrade buildings to a certain extent, you will sometimes have to ask your friends to help you fully upgrade them to the next level. This is especially true with special buildings like warehouses, gang houses, and dwellings. This game will require some active friends to get the most out of the game!
My only complaint about the game is that it seems to rely on micro-transactions to get the most out of the game, like having 3 construction workers to build 3 buildings at once. Since this is a competitive game, one can see where some people can get into a “pay to win” strategy, but thankfully it is not as bad as other games on the market that feature competitive play.
Overall this game has potential, but be wary of micro transactions if you intend to dig deeper into this game, and you will need friends to build upgrades and increase influence. Give this game a try if competitive base building is your thing, just to give you a warning about microtransactions!
