The game is a reskin of a previous Nintendo puzzle game, Magnetica, but instead of marbles it is played with...people?!
YES! In Tokyo Crash Mobs the object of the game is to clear people marching in a line by throwing a person of an identical colored outfit in their direction. The character doing the throwing is one of two women, Grace or Savannah, both of who play slightly differently. Grace throws people which means they come in attacking from above but Savannah rolls people meaning that they will hit a person from below. This also means that a person in the line can avoid an incoming person by jumping up. Grace must eliminate people from a line to try and enter a store earlier than the rest of the crowd but as for Savannah, the reason she is clearing lines of people is so they don't march up to a Big Red Button that will drop her through a pit into an intergalactic death.
The game is divided up not into worlds, but into weeks, with every stage being a different day. Grace and Savannah alternate levels on Monday through Saturday before they must team up on Sunday to take on a line of ninjas by playing with not the touch screen, but with gyro controls. The entire game is wrapped up with full-motion video cutscenes showing Grace and Savannah engaging in random activities.
The game features the following tropes:
- Action Girl: Grace and Savannah can pick up and heft other people with zero physical effort.
- Alien Abduction: The UFO power-up will suck up all people on screen with an outfit the same color as the UFO.
- Artistic License – Physics: There is no way a person's body thrown in the way Grace does could go efficiently flying that fast and in a straight line, nor would it have the momentum to knock another body out of the way. In addition, a person's body cannot roll nearly as long or efficiently as it does in Savannah's levels.
- Bathos: The game does not take itself seriously at all. Between the fact that the two women are engaged in silly situations and strange things are happening in Tokyo you can tell the story leans on the satire side.
- Be the Ball: What becomes of people rolled by Savannah.
- Big Red Button: The people marching around Savannah are slowly approaching one. They will send her through a Pit Trap death if they activate it.
- Disproportionate Retribution:
- Grace is trying to cut to the front of the line to enter a store right at opening time, so she resorts to flinging people at other people to eliminate them from the line. If they start to make it inside the store, she gets locked out.
- The line of people crowding around Savannah want to send her to an intergalactic death by activating a button that sends her down a pit, yet her equally as bizarre way of getting back is to engage in eliminating them.
- Eldritch Location: The version of Tokyo seen in this game by far.
- Grievous Harm with a Body: Grace and Savannah attack people in line by hitting them with other people.
- Improbable Aiming Skills: Like other games of this style, aiming where you throw is a central mechanic of gameplay.
- Pit Trap: Savannah meets her doom if the crowd of people in her levels activate the Big Red Button.
- Reality Is Out to Lunch: Big buttons that can drop you into outer space, weekly problems with ninja invasions, the occasional UFO kidnapping victim? The version of Tokyo in this game is a very bizarre world!
- Replay Mode: The Movie Maze is this game's replay mode. Uniquely the player must use the touchscreen to navigate a virtual maze with the cutscenes at dead ends and the player can even unlock new cutscenes by tapping on certain places on the touchscreen.
- Songs in the Key of Panic: Like other versions of the game, the music becomes more frantic if the line of people reaches a certain distance from the goal.
- Soundtrack Dissonance: The Movie Maze adds music to the in-game cutscenes that don't fit what is happening in them.
- Unexpected Shmup Level: Sundays have Grace and Savannah teaming up against armies of ninjas in a level that plays in a similar fashion to a line-up shooter game.
