Playboy: The Mansion Review

You are Hugh Hefner. You have the mansion, the women, the money, and anything else you could ever want. Life is good. Playboy: The Mansion gives you the challenge of living the Hef lifestyle as well as producing Playboy Magazine. Sadly, the concept is relatively interesting, but the execution of this Sims-style game is lacking.

WARNING: This game is rated “M” for Mature and contains nudity, strong sexual content, and use of alcohol and should not be played by children under the age of 17.

The Life Of A Playboy

Running the Playboy empire and producing a magazine every month is a lot of work, so Playboy: The Mansion is a little more complicated than you might assume at first glance. You have to hire staff writers and photographers as well as models to be Playboy Bunnies and Playmates. You also have to build a group of trusted friends to help you out once in a while. How you accomplish all of this is by throwing parties at your mansion. Throwing a party is as simple as choosing “Throw Party” from the menu and then choosing what you want your guests to wear (casual, swimwear, lingerie, etc.) and then deciding who you want to invite. Once the party starts, you can chat up the women in order to try and get them to do a photo shoot with you or you can get celebrities to write essays or do interviews. Governing all of this is your limited bank account as well as how famous you are. High quality content costs money and famous celebrities won’t want to work with you if you aren’t on the same level of fame as they are, so you have to keep all of this in balance in order to be successful. Once you have content, you can put together a magazine and publish it in order to make money and live out your dreams for another month.

May I See A Menu, Please?

All of the actions in Playboy: The Mansion are controlled through the menu. Building your mansion and then filling it with stuff to keep your party guests entertained is all done through easy to use menus. Likewise, interacting with your guests as well as the objects in your house is as easy as pressing a button so that a list of options pop up on screen. The way you talk to your guests is by choosing conversation options for business or romance or things like that and as you keep taking to people several meters will change depending on how much they like you, what they want to do, and what they like to talk about.

Keeping people happy through the conversation trees is the key to the game, but it is actually a major weakness in the whole experience. First off, characters don’t actually say anything and instead just mumble gibberish. Leisure Suit Larry was actually bearable because the conversations you could have were so entertaining. Not so here. Also, the way conversations play out is ridiculous. When talking to a woman, the game basically follows this path: Talk ->Talk -> Talk -> Have sex on couch. That is just goofy.

Naughty Bits

One thing Playboy: The Mansion has going for it is that accessing the nudity and sexual situations is far easier than it is in The Guy Game or Leisure Suit Larry. When you hire Playmates you can change their clothes to whatever you want so you can have topless women on screen within five minutes of starting up the game. Also, like I said above, conversation choices go from “Friendly Handshake” to “Have Sex on Couch” extremely quickly, so within ten minutes of loading up the game you can already be having sex. Sex in the game isn’t too naughty since both Hef and his lady friend have underwear on, so it comes across as funny instead of anything close to erotic. Something mildly entertaining is that each piece of furniture you get allows you to have sex in a different position so buying new furniture is always good for a few laughs just to see what is going to happen next. An interesting thing about the game is that when you have a photo shoot, you actually get to control the camera and pose the model. As you meet goals and complete missions, you will earn reward points that you can use to unlock bonus content which are centerfolds and photos taken from the real Playboy archives.

Graphics, Sound, and The Bottom Line

Graphically, Playboy: The Mansion isn’t much to look at. It is very similar to The Sims, so the characters are fairly simply designed and the environments feature just barely enough detail that you know what you are looking at. When the game switches into the photoshoot mode you get nicer looking models to take pictures of, but they still aren’t much to look at.

The sound is particularly disappointing because characters don’t ever say anything. It is just mumbled gibberish. You have some advisors that tell you what to do next and things like that in full speech, but the normal characters don’t say anything and that is a letdown. There are several songs on the soundtrack that cover a number of different genres, so the music is fairly good and suits the game just fine.

Overall, Playboy: The Mansion doesn’t quite live up to its potential. It gives you access to nudity and sexual content much, much quicker than other recent adult-themed games (and that really is the whole reason why you play these games, isn’t it?) but the gameplay just isn’t very good. It actually is more fun than those other adult games, but that isn’t saying much. It almost works, but Playboy: The Mansion isn’t worth more than a rental if even that.