I’ve often joked with my buddies about the social etiquette required when using a men’s room. You have lines of urinals, but you don’t want to stand right next to someone else if you can avoid it for multiple reasons. Then there’s the stalls, which is a whole other ball of wax and requires certain other considerations. Long story short, there’s a lot going on when a guy has to relieve himself, and it can be quite humorous.
Which is why when I discovered Men’s Room Mayhem, I knew I had to buy it. Would this game be able to provide the male bathroom experience as I know it, or would it just go down the drain? Let’s find out.
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Flight Control Redux
You may have played Flight Control before, and if so, you’ve got a leg up on Men’s Room. In Flight Control, you have multiple planes that you have to guide into a runway by using your finger to guide them along a path. Some vehicles flew slower than others, and you certainly didn’t want a mid-air collision. It was a lot of fun to play.
It looks easy, but not so much.
Men’s Room is essentially Flight Control with dudes. You have an overhead view of a bathroom complete with stall(s), urinals and sinks. When a guy enters the room, a pop-up window appears with their intended destination — a yellow drop for a urinal, and a toilet paper roll for a stall. Use your finger to drag a path to their spot of choice and let them do their thing. Once complete, drag them either to the exit for a quick getaway, or to a sink for a hand washing bonus. Sounds easy, right?
It’s Not Easy
Like Flight Control, Men’s Room gets more and more complicated as the game progresses. As paths are drawn, there will be times when two men get too close to each other. If they just miss, then there’s a bonus. If they collide, then they fight, and you have to break it up. That fight puts a little bloodstain on the floor, as well as in the white boxes in the top right corner of the screen. Get too many of those, and you’ll lose the level.
Whoops. Fight broke out.
But wait, there’s more. Some men come into the room with a timer over their heads. If you don’t reach a urinal or stall fast enough, then they pee on the floor — another mark in those white boxes. There are old men who come into the room, and they don’t move very quickly. Some guys move super fast. And when the girls come in — which happens later on in the hotel and bar levels — they have a circle around them that acts like a force field. Guys can’t enter that circle, they just get pushed out, which sometimes leads to fights. Oh, and if you have multiple people at the urinals and leave a space between them, you get an etiquette bonus. I wish that happened in real life.
Just like in real life, don’t enter a woman’s personal bubble when she’s in a restroom.
There is a saving grace to all that blood and urine on the ground, however. At the end of each stage there’s a timer that lets you scrub away the bad stuff and the facilities using your finger. Just wipe quickly and as the spots disappear, so do the marks against you. Plus, you get extra points.
Some of your goals.
Point is, Men’s Room is a lot more complex than it seems from the start. The tutorial level makes it all seem so simple that you may do what I did and almost ditch the game. That’s because of a feature in the game that seems like a glitch. See, each level is just a way for you to complete goals. You don’t actually progress to the next level until you’ve completed all those goals and selected the level. Meaning, there’s no flag that waves or anything when you’re able to move on, you have to do it manually. Remember this in the tutorial, because clearing the stage is as simple as two moves.
The Look
Men’s Room Mayhem is not a pretty game, but then again, it probably shouldn’t be. Although I try not to use bathrooms that smell like a combo between Brut and dead cat, it still happens, and men’s rooms are not always the prettiest things to look at (Granted, I’ve never found blood on the floor before, but there’s still hope). As a result, Men’s Room looks a bit gritty. The urinals are dirty, the sinks look like they’ve never been cleaned and sometimes the floors are so brown that you wonder if it’s just dirt. That’s OK, the game doesn’t suffer for it.
Troughs? Icky.
The characters are cute too, in as much as you can expect a grubby construction worker to be cute. They’re cartoony and fun, and each has their own style. And just in case you were wondering (or concerned), there is no visualization of their cartoon “parts” as it were. Any time someone is doing their deed, they get blurred out just like in The Sims.
The All-Important Fun Factor
I really enjoy playing this game. The humor gets me perfectly, the concept is fun and it uses touch mechanics in a smart — albeit not very original — way. And even though it takes Flight Control and essentially translates it into dudes and bowel functions, it works.
IAP is present, but not annoying.
There are some aspects that get frustrating, as they do with most games. As you get higher and higher in levels, there so many people enter the room that it becomes almost impossible to manage them at all. But again, since you can progress to the next level once you have all the goals complete, if you get frustrated you may just be able to move on. I should probably mention Blitz mode as well, where guys just come in and out quickly the entire time. It’s fun, but not my style, so I’ll just leave it at that.
A quick note here about the IAP situation. It is present, but it’s not annoying. The game comes with five levels, only the first of which is free to start, then the rest unlock as you complete goals. There are additional level packs, and you can buy those for $0.99. I didn’t, as the depth of the game was enough for me, but I can see doing so in the future.
Finishing Up
Bottom line: Men’s Room Mayhem is a fun game. It uses a similar dynamic to other games, yes, but the additional crack into the bathroom genre makes it as fresh as a bathroom can be. It’s not perfect, and there are times when I got frustrated and left it alone for a bit. But in the end, I always came back to finish doing my duty, because it’s just that fun.