Rope Hero Vice Town vs Mafia City Wars: In-Depth Comparison

Rope Hero Vice Town and Rope Hero Mafia City Wars are two popular open-world superhero action games for mobile devices developed by Naxeex Ltd. Both games put you in the role of a superhero with a grappling hook rope that allows you to swing around a large city, fight crime, and complete various missions and quests. While the two games share many similarities, there are also some key differences between them.

In this article, we’ll take an in-depth look at Rope Hero Vice Town and Rope Hero Mafia City Wars to compare their features, gameplay, graphics, and more to help you decide which one is the best fit for you.

Overview of Each Game

Rope Hero Vice Town

Rope Hero Vice Town was released in 2017 and is the first game in the Rope Hero series. In this game, you play as a masked vigilante superhero known simply as Rope Hero. Armed with a grappling hook rope, you can freely explore a large open city, swinging between buildings and fighting criminals using hand-to-hand combat and an arsenal of weapons. The game features a variety of missions and side quests to complete as you work to rid the city of crime. You can also freely attack civilians, but this will cause the police to chase after you.

Rope Hero Mafia City Wars

Rope Hero Mafia City Wars is a sequel to Rope Hero Vice Town released in 2023. It features updated graphics and expanded gameplay compared to the original. In this game, you once again play as Rope Hero, but the setting has moved to a new city overrun by warring mafia gangs. The core swinging and combat mechanics remain similar to Vice Town, but City Wars adds some new features like a district capture mode where you fight to free city districts from mafia control, boss battles against mafia leaders, new weapons like a flamethrower and freeze gun, and more customization options for your hero’s appearance.

Graphics and Performance

Both Rope Hero games feature 3D open world environments that you can freely explore. The graphics are decent for mobile games, with detailed city streets, buildings, vehicles and character models. However, the visuals are not on par with top tier console or PC games. Between the two, Rope Hero Mafia City Wars has a clear edge in graphics, with higher quality textures, lighting effects, and character models compared to Vice Town. The city also feels more alive and detailed in City Wars.

In terms of performance, both games ran smoothly on my iPhone 12 Pro Max and Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra test devices at high graphics settings. Frame rates were steady around 30 FPS. Load times are a bit long, but reasonable. Both games are quite large, with Vice Town requiring about 2.5 GB of storage space and City Wars needing nearly 4 GB.

Gameplay

The core gameplay in both Rope Hero games revolves around using your grappling hook to swing around the city and engaging in combat with criminals and enemy gang members. The swinging mechanics work well and make traversing the large maps fun. You can run up the sides of buildings and perform acrobatic flips as well. The combat is fairly simple, with basic punches, kicks, and combos, along with the ability to use weapons like guns, swords, grenades and more. It’s not the deepest combat system, but it works for mindless action.

Some other gameplay elements include driving vehicles like cars, tanks and helicopters, a wanted system where cops or enemy gangs chase you if you cause too much mayhem, a variety of side missions and challenges to complete, and character customization. Completing missions and finding collectibles around the city earns you money and experience to level up and unlock new skills and items.

Between the two games, Mafia City Wars offers expanded gameplay features and content. The new district control mode gives you something more focused to work towards, and the boss battles add some variety to the combat. The new weapons and hero skins are also welcome additions. However, the core gameplay remains very similar between both titles overall.

Controls

The controls in both games are fairly standard for mobile third-person action games. You have a virtual joystick on the left side of the screen to move your character, and buttons on the right side to attack, jump, swing, switch weapons, enter vehicles, and so on. The controls work decently, but aiming ranged weapons can feel finicky, and the button layout feels a bit cluttered on smaller phone screens.

I did encounter some control glitches at times, where my inputs wouldn’t register properly or my character would get stuck on geometry. This seemed to happen a bit more often in Vice Town compared to City Wars in my experience. Overall though, the controls are serviceable but not great. Some added customization options would be nice.

Monetization

Both Rope Hero Vice Town and Mafia City Wars are free-to-play games that feature ads and in-app purchases. Ads in the form of full-screen video commercials appear quite frequently, about every 5-10 minutes during gameplay, as well as popping up when pausing, launching or quitting the game. You can pay a one-time fee to remove ads.

For in-app purchases, you can buy in-game currency in various bundles that range from $0.99 to $99. This premium currency can then be spent on upgrades, items, weapons, vehicles, hero skins, and more. Prices for individual items range from a dollar or two for small stat boosts up to $20 or more for the fanciest hero costumes and vehicles.

While the IAPs are not necessary to complete the games, they can speed up progress significantly. Unlocking everything would cost hundreds of dollars. Luckily, the matchmaking for multiplayer challenges is not based on purchased gear, so it remains balanced for all players. The monetization in both games is fairly aggressive though, with the frequent ads being quite annoying.

Story and Characters

There’s not much of a focused story in either Rope Hero game. You simply play as a silent protagonist superhero trying to fight crime in the city. The games feature some brief dialogue during missions, but no real character development or narrative arc. It’s all just a loose excuse for the gameplay.

The side characters and villains are also pretty generic, mostly being random gang members and criminals with little personality. Some of the mission-givers have a bit more spice to them, but they still ultimately feel like shallow stereotypes.

This lack of story and character is not necessarily a huge problem for this type of game, where the focus is on action and open-world exploration. But some more interesting worldbuilding and characters could make the experience more engaging. Mafia City Wars puts a bit more effort into this, with the warring mafia factions and boss battles, but it’s still pretty bare-bones.

Audio

The audio in both games is serviceable but underwhelming. The music consists of generic-sounding orchestral superhero themes that are fine but forgettable. Sound effects for impacts, explosions, and weapons are a bit crunchy and compressed-sounding. Voice acting is minimal, with most characters only having a handful of repeated one-liners. Nothing about the audio stands out as particularly impressive.

Bugs and Glitches

In my time playing Rope Hero Vice Town and Mafia City Wars, I did not encounter any major bugs that broke the game or erased my progress. However, I did experience a number of smaller glitches on a regular basis. These included:

Clipping through objects and getting stuck in geometry
Inconsistent hit detection during combat
Enemies spawning inside walls or objects
Falling out of the world when grappling to certain spots
Missions not triggering properly
Framerate drops and freezes, especially during intense action

None of these bugs were severe enough to ruin the fun, but they did make the games feel a bit rough and unpolished overall. Mafia City Wars generally ran smoother and had fewer glitches compared to Vice Town in my experience, but both games could use some more optimization and bug fixing.

Conclusion

In summary, Rope Hero Vice Town and Rope Hero Mafia City Wars are both decent open-world superhero action games that provide some simple, mobile-friendly fun. They feature large sandbox cities to explore, plenty of missions and side content, and satisfying grappling hook traversal. The core gameplay is enjoyable in short bursts.

However, the games are far from perfect. The combat is quite repetitive and mashy, the controls have some issues, the graphics are mediocre, the story and characters are nearly non-existent, and there are regular bugs and glitches. The monetization with frequent ads and pricey IAPs is also rather aggressive.

Between the two games, Rope Hero Mafia City Wars is the clear winner. It takes the formula of Vice Town and improves on it in nearly every way, with better graphics, added gameplay features and modes, more content, and a bit more polish. But the two games are still very similar at their core.

Ultimately, if you enjoy superhero action games and don’t mind the free-to-play monetization, you’ll likely have some fun with Rope Hero Vice Town or Mafia City Wars. Just don’t expect them to match the quality and depth of top-tier open-world console/PC games. They’re best enjoyed in short play sessions and with tempered expectations.

You may also want to check Rope Hero Vice Town vs Stickman Rope Hero.