The Mastermind

Crime Tycoon

In The Mastermind, you play a mobster building an empire of thieves, drug sales, and legitimate business for laundering your ill-gotten gains, while staving off (or crushing) competing crime bosses.

An excellent concept, and it's perhaps surprising it hasn't been done before.

For a low-budget title, The Mastermind has surprising strategic depth; you have a huge number of options, in terms of equipment to buy and mobsters to hire, businesses to take over, crimes to commit, and cops to bribe. Despite the complexity, the interface is quite intuitive, and a tutorial works to teach you how to use it tolerably well.

There are many potential paths to victory, leading to a high level of replay value. Unlike most sim/tycoon titles, it's turn-based, which gives you a little more time to plan your strategy; and since you're playing in an established city, you don't spend a lot of time placing buildings or other constructions.

One minor caveat; English is not the developer's native language, and occasionally the text is a little funky ("Thanks for those equipments, boss.") But it's not too jarring, and potentially even humorous at times.

The Developer Says

The Mastermind: notorious masterminds are back in town and street mobs threaten your local businesses. This time you play tougher and smarter!

In this strategy game, you work as a crime boss to take charge of the streets by setting up illegal crimes while running legal businesses.

Fans of action games would not be excited by this game but strategy gamers and fans looking for innovative games would definitely want to try it...

At first, you can do some robbery and stealing using your gangsters and hire additional thugs. As you progress, various options are opened to you as you may need to bribe police officers on your trail or donate to charity to clean up public suspicion. Demolish your rival businesses to keep your own businesses in good shape. Smuggle guns and drugs and arm your thugs for the local gang-wars between crime-lords. There is a great strategy involved here, no doubts about that.

The game is open-ended and there are even 3 different ways to win the game. There are lots of activities and strategies - even a bit too much at time - and you would be thinking lots of new ways for gaining advantages over AI-controlled mastermind. This may even make the game a little difficult at first time. You may need to play the game for 2-3 times to get a feeling of how various strategies work out.

There is some mini-games in the game like Blackjack game where you can spend your hard-earned money at a casino and Gang-War where your thugs go head-to-head with AI gangsters.

Fan of action genre would not impressed by the game but strategy gamers and fans looking for innovative games would definitely want to check the game out. This is one of unique and rare games out there on the internet that boldly ventured outside puzzler/shooter/platformer comfort zone. Either case this is a game that you would love it and keep playing it for several hours or toss it away in the first minute.

Features

• hire gangsters to execute various crimes
  
• buy more than 50 business in town each with unique advantage and disadvantage
  
• smuggle drugs and guns
  
• fight Gang Wars with AI-controlled masterminds
  
• bribe police officers
  
• buy luxury items like sport cars, mansions, masterpiece paintings
  
• Play Blackjack at casino
  
• Multiple ways to win the game (or lose it)!

Reviews

""The Mastermind" is a cerebral and innovative offering that will not appeal to all gamers. Fans of action games or aficionados of Rockstar's GTA series looking for something similar will not be impressed."
   - Bytten

"A fascinating and extremely well-thought out game..."
   - Russ Carroll, Game Tunnel

Awards

Bronze Award, Bytten

Silver Award, Game Tunnel