Boss Around an Office of Superheroes in Middle Manager of Justice

Double Fine adds a mundane dose of day-to-day bureaucracy to the world of super-powered crime fighting.

Double Fine Productions, the developer behind Psychonauts and Brütal Legend, has unveiled its first offering for a mobile platform. Middle Manager of Justice is a free-to-play time management simulator for iOS devices, in which you take the role of an office manager. Players must head up a group of superheroes, recruiting and training them before sending them out to fight crime.

The company’s trademark sense of humor is very much a part of this game, with new middle managers greeted by being told “We’ve never seen a candidate with a resume so adequate!” The rest of the game is similarly humorous, and has an isometric presentation that will make many iOS free-to-play veterans feel right at home.

While Middle Manager of Justice is free to play, everything in this world has its price. Any action the player makes takes a certain amount of time to complete, and this gradually increases as you progress through the game. The timers will continue to tick down even when the game is closed, albeit somewhat slower than if the player is actively playing the game. Those tired of waiting can speed any of the timers up by spending some of the game’s secondary currency, “Superium”. Superium can be gained in large amounts by defeating the game’s bosses or by digging into your wallet for some cold, hard, real-world cash.

Amidst recent tales of in-app purchases gone awry, the game’s creator Kee Chi took to the Double Fine forums to defend the use of Superium to speed up game time. “We’ve been VERY careful about any sort of predatory iOS IAP practices,” he informed concerned users. “You can play through Middle Manager without paying anything! There are absolutely no paywalls.” His ultimate goal is a game in which players are never stuck in a situation where a payment would be necessary to proceed.

Double Fine hasn’t set a release date for Middle Manager of Justice beyond “in the coming weeks”, but says that it has submitted the game to Apple for certification. When it does eventually come out, it will be released in Canada first, and an international release will follow shortly afterwards.

Source: Kotaku