Mobile Game Review: Middle Manager of Justice!

Tired of the same old boring office routine at work? Do you want to punch the clock while also punching evil in the face?  Then Double Fine's Middle Manager of Justice might be a great game choice for you!  This iOS/Android game is a bundle of superhero-packed fun, putting you in the manager position at  Justice Corp--perhaps the only office where wearing spandex to work is mandatory.  You're in charge of overseeing professional development, crime fighting, and the general well-being of a band of superheroes that you have recruited.  So really, the fate of your crime-ridden, alien-infested city and its neighboring communities--or even the WORLD--rests in your hands!

I found Middle Manager of Justice to be extremely addictive and entertaining, with clever dialogue and colorful characters--certainly enough to get me through four long flights over the Labor Day weekend.  Your middle manager is initially afforded the opportunity to recruit one superhero for Justice Corp, which gets you through the tutorial phase of the game.  As your new hero fights crime and wins the favor of the surrounding neighborhoods, your Justice Corp branch begins to earn money and superium, the latter allowing you to recruit additional superheroes.  But sending your heroes out to battle and earning cash isn't enough to get through the game: opponents get progressively harder (go figure), and your middle manager must ensure that the superheroes are, well...managed--that is, they receive additional training, morale-boosting, and rest as needed!  So you must distribute finances to effectively expand your Justice Corps facilities and buy new gear for your heroes so they can keep fighting evil for another day.

Snapshot of the Justice Corp branch office screen, showing the various facility
upgrades that can be purchased throughout the game.

 

There are only a few main screens to navigate in the game.  The first one is your Justice Corp branch office, where you assign tasks to your middle manager and superheroes, upgrade facilities, and purchase new items.  Certain rooms are needed at the Justice Corp office pretty early in the game, such as a gym to train up your heroes and a bedroom to get them rested for the next fight; but other facility upgrades can be bought later, such as a lab to research new equipment, or extra cubicles where heroes can do desk work to increase the office profit when they're not out fighting.  All this activity probably doesn't sound really complex, and it's not... until you start juggling the activities of three or four superheroes.  Suddenly all those multi-tasking skills come in handy!  But don't worry, you won't have to deal with paperwork like most middle managers do.  Phew.

 

The second main screen you will navigate is your city status screen, which allows you to view outstanding crime activity--where your heroes can engage in battle--and the level of satisfaction each district has with your crime-fighting activities.  Districts where you dispense justice quickly will be more satisfied, and therefore yield more money for your branch.  You also get more money for responding to potential engagements as quickly as possible.  Each battle icon displays a clock countdown which determines how much experience and money you will get from succeeding in that battle.

 

This is a yak that you can buy for your
office, which dispenses unlimited warm
yak milk for your heroes during battle.
Yum!

The third and final screen is your battle mode screen.  From here, you will manage your heroes during an engagement, provide them with helpful consumable items as needed, and utilize their special powers as available.  It should be noted that you will have the option to "delegate" battles, which allows you to skip the battle mode screen and go about doing other things while your heroes are fighting.  This should only be used if you are fairly confident that your heroes can manage the battle without assistance (you'll get to see a % chance of success when you select your heroes for a given battle),  but the delegation option can be immensely helpful in saving time when you're trying to simultaneously manage activities of a larger group of heroes.

 

 

 



Sample of the battle mode screen with the Masked
Mummy and Captain Premium dispensing justice.



Overall, the interface works well and allows you to move along quickly.  While there is some funny dialogue that I personally enjoyed reading (one plot section involves a displaced Canadian dragon), it's very easy to click through all of that if you just want to get through the game.  I think a player could complete the main game mission with three heroes, so there's not a ton of incentive to recruit more than that. Having more than three makes the game more challenging because you have more people to manage.  I found the various heroes available for recruitment entertaining and wanted to see the different special powers of characters like Surge Protector, @Man, and the Masked Mummy, so I ended up with a total of six heroes by the end of the game.  My play-through inevitably took longer because I was sharing my resources amongst six people, but it was worth it!



This is Sweet Justice, my first hero
recruit. Isn't he cute in his lil' mask?

 

While the main gameplay screens are fairly easy to navigate, later in the game it was somewhat cumbersome to locate, cycle through, and assign tasks to all six of my heroes from the Justice Corp branch office screen.  You can only have four active heroes at any given time, so you have to continually jump to another screen to toggle on/off characters.  Sometimes the swapping-out changes wouldn't take, necessitating repeat attempts to cycle characters.  This can be frustrating when you are trying to move quickly amongst characters to deal with a battle or get them rested up for the next fight.  I think there is probably a better way to integrate this function with the office screen.

 

Overall the game was very engaging, but the mundane "office" tasks (such as sending heroes to rest or boost morale) just became tedious after a while. But you still have to do those tasks to level-up your heroes enough to beat the next bad-guy boss.  There are premium options available that will allow you to move things along faster--you can use real money to buy more superium, which allows you to expedite training of your heroes, recruit more heroes, etc.--so I imagine the theory is that players will pay that money to get through the game faster.  Still, if you want to play MMOJ as a completely free-play game, it's a tolerable level of monotony given the other positive traits of the game.

 

Middle Manger of Justice is a mobile game well worth your time--approximately 10-12 hours of your time, based on my play-through this past holiday weekend.  It encompasses all the little fun details of artistry, dialogue and quirkiness we have come to love and expect from Double Fine Productions.  So get out there and use your thumbs of justice to fight some evil, middle manager!