I’ve been playing iMob Online – described as “the first FREE online massively multi player mob game for the iPhone and iPod Touch” – quite a bit over the last few days, and enjoying it when it’s working properly.
The game has a sort of Goodfellas or Sopranos theme to it …
Start off as a small time street thug and work your way up to a iMob boss! Invite your friends to join your mob and run dangerous missions. Buy devastating weapons, exotic properties, and put millions in the bank. Rule the iphone, silence your enemies, die with the most toys and win!
iMob is easy to play. You carry out Missions and fight with other aspiring mobsters to gain experience points that will move you up to higher levels. You buy weapons with money earned from your missions (like stealing a car or holding up a liquor store, and similar) which help you when you’re attacking others or defending against attacks.
You also can (and should) buy properties (from land fills to much swankier locales) and then develop on them to keep your hourly income building, which then helps finance more weapons, more property, more income, and so on. The range of weapons / missions / properties available grows as you move up the levels. There are chat features within the game as well, but I’ve hardly used them because each time I view any of it, it’s full of pretty inane gibberish and nothing that’s useful to move forward in the game.
Another major part of the game is building up your mob. You can find allies using the iPhone’s location services (to detect nearby players to invite to join you) and you can invite people directly from your Contacts, or find others directly by their ‘Friend Code’. Mine is 100114234 in case anyone wants to join up 🙂
Although iMob itself is free, there are options to buy further ‘respect packs’ in the App Store if you want to move up the ranks faster – I only tried out a $0.99 pack that gave 10 respect points right at the outset of playing, and haven’t seen the need since then to try any of the more expensive ones that offered lots more respect points.
Here’s a listing of its features from its App Store description:
- FREE Massive Online multi player RPG for the iPhone AND the iPod Touch
- FREE updates with new missions, weapons, and gifts from The Don!
- Invite your friends to join your iMob via email, GPS, WiFi, and friend codes
- Months of Game play
- Fight online rivals
- Real time news feed
- World wide high score boards
- Comment on profiles and send bulletins to your friends
- Mark your enemies for death with a cash bounty
- Kick rivals in the face!
There are two major problems with iMob right now though. One is that it seems the ‘backend’ setup cannot yet handle the number of players. That’s my guess anyway because the first couple days I played it, everything worked quite well – but over the last three days the app frequently fails to connect and bombs back to the home screen on launch, and is tremendously slow (or fails completely) when trying to get to the Fights screen.
The second, and perhaps even bigger, problem is that the game is rife with serious cheating right now – for instance, many folks who buy properties and then set their phone’s clock forward by a bunch of years and accumulate masses of money very quickly. In fact, it’s even talked about on the app’s App Store Reviews section.
Apparently the developers are well aware of the cheating situation, and will be dealing with it soon:
Hopefully they are also working on addressing their connectivity and network issues that are making the game borderline unplayable at times over recent days.
If they get these issues resolved, I think iMob is a decent game. It’s not heavy on strategy, but it’s fun to play when it’s running well …
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TAGS: iMob Online, iphone apps
