Men's Room Mayhem Review (videogames)

A chaos management game in the vein of Flight Control and Harbour Master HD, Men’s Room Mayhem is a tightly paced and addictive mobile game. 

It’s made by RipStone, an independent Liverpool based publisher and development house, who first opened their doors in 2011. 

Ripstone have since released a number of games on mobile platforms like iOS and Android, as well as on consoles like the PlayStation 3 and the PlayStation Vita. 

This comes as little surprise, considering that RipStone’s co-founder, Creative Director and former Sony Computer Entertainment Producer Phil Gaskell, had a hand in the game’s conception.

The premise is simple: You use the touchscreen to trace out paths, guiding each patron towards either the urinals or the toilet, depending on their needs. 

Extra points can be earned by making patrons wash their hands and avoiding near misses, before sending them packing before the timer runs out. 

As the waves go on, the game gets more intense: you’ll be called upon to juggle different walking speeds, break up fights, clean up ‘accidents’ and even escort the odd pretty lady through the facility. Ideally, without causing half of your male clientele to piss and s**t themselves on the spot out of sheer terror! Which happens! In the game, we mean… In the game.

Completing in-game objectives unlock stars which in turn unlock new stages, each with their own comical theme. And the game’s ‘Etiquette’ mechanic, which awards players for leaving a space between patrons at the urinal, is just one example of how RipStone’s quirky sense of humour has directly influenced game play.

Being a touch based game, the larger the screen you can play it on, the better. We found that the extra real estate afforded by the larger screen say, of a 9.7 inch iPad, made the mayhem a little easier to handle on later levels than it was even on the Vita’s 5 inch OLED. 

Regardless of platform, the bold character design and light-hearted, child-friendly aesthetic look great and make for a game that should appeal to everyone.

One complaint that can be made (albeit one inherent to pretty much every wave based game ever made), is that once the player achieves any degree of competency at the game, the first few waves quickly become a chore, leaving the player to question whether or not they can be bothered to climb all the way back up to those dizzying heights at which the game really excels.