GameLab is a casual developer mostly known for creating Diner Dash and Subway Scramble. Following in on the footsteps of what made Diner dash work, they now bring us Miss Management, a chaotic office management puzzle/arcade game. Key word for me: management!
In Miss Management you control Denise, the newly arrived manager to an office that has a… let’s say, peculiar bunch of workers.
There’s plenty to do to get the office in order, but for the most part your job is to control Denise and deliver any incoming tasks to a worker’s desk so he or she completes the task. Every task they complete gives you some money.
You also control other workers to keep them from stressing out at their job. One of the things that makes them most stressed is completing tasks that they aren’t good at. Each worker’s desk has an indicator for the skills they are better at. Orange is art, blue is technical, green is financial, pink is text. An arrow up means that worker is particularly good at the skill of that color, an arrow down means he/she will stress out doing that kind of task. A dot is just a “neutral” classification.
Tasks appear on Denise’s desk, and unfortunately, she can only carry one at a time. Tasks also have like a graph on them, with up to 4 dark bars. The less dark bars, the faster the task will be completed. Having too many tasks on her desk or on any employees desk will make Denise stress out.
Every worker has something they particularly like to do to relax, and there is something else that annoys them to no end. You’ll have to do a lot of micro-management around the office, balancing completing tasks and having some relaxing time. The problem is, something that helps a worker relax will make another really mad. There’s this particular guy who loves to nap on the couch, a lady who chain smokes, an artist who prefers doodling on the white board, a techie who will only feel better when playing with the arcade machine, and so on. But while they do it, they annoy each other.
Your office will have several different “relaxing” items: a couch, a white board, a water cooler (where two people can meet to chat), arcade machine, smoking area, kitchen, stereo and bathroom. They won’t all be available at once, so you need to figure out more than one way an employee can relax. A stressed out employee will be out of commission for the day, which can make the difference between achieving all the goals or just the required ones.
Denise’s job is all about keeping things running as smooth as they can, but she has to fulfill whatever goals on a given level. The goals appear at the beginning of each level and they are then displayed on the top portion of the screen. Goal icons will have the face of the employee and a meter or counter. The meter means that the employee must do something for a certain amount of time. The counter means the employee wants to do something a specific number of times, or get Denise to buy them a certain number of objects.
When the goals asks for particular objects, Denise must spend some money at the store. The store has little morale boosters as well as skill manuals that increase the worker’s skill for a day.
Basic goals are the ones you need to advance the game, but you can keep on playing to complete some extra goals. Extra goals are “unlocked” after you complete the basic ones.
While very similar to the mechanics of Diner Dash and even Subway Scramble, the content of the game isn’t appropriate for everyone. I noticed a homosexual reference, something about Xanax and Mahavir’s behavior towards his female co-workers might also be enough to upset someone. I wouldn’t recommend it to younger children, no matter how easy it is to play.
I found the dialogs to drag a bit, but there is humor to be had in the speech balloons. The music is pleasant, though a few more tunes would have made a difference. The sound effects are interesting and some of them pretty funny. The arcade machine makes electronic sounds, the scribbling on the white board sounds like a real marker, the microwave sounds like a real one (my husband asked me a couple of times if I was cooking something), and the warning sound for a stressed out employee is hard to miss.
If you like this type of games, there’s plenty of fun to be had in Miss Management. And if you’re one who thinks desk jobs are a breeze, you try managing this crazy office! If you prefer waiting for a retail version, it will be out March 1, 2008, and you can even get your hands on it and try it out at Target stores.
Special thanks to Eric Zimmerman and GameLab for providing the full version of the game.