After you've done that, the prisoner may still not listen to you. To assign a prisoner a job, you have to open up the submenu, click on the prisoner tab, check the minimap at the top of the screen, select a building you want him to work in, select a position you want him to work at, and finally exit out of the window. But that's too simple and intuitive for Prison Tycoon 4. You would think that all you would have to do is to select a prisoner and right click on the area you want him to work at. As it turns out, assigning prisoners different jobs is another painful task. Trying to be the responsible warden, I tried to break up the action as best as possible by separating different gang members into separate work environments. The whole game is like this, and it really hurts to not have a proper tutorial. By the time you try to initiate all of this, a prisoner might have already died. From there you click on the guard tab, select a specific guard, look at the minimap to check the whereabouts of the guard, close the submenu, investigate the most recent known whereabouts of the guard, locate and right mouse click the guy (you can't create a drag box to select anything in this game), move him into the action, right mouse click on a troubled prisoner, and select the beat-him-up icon. Since it's pretty much impossible to tell the difference between a guard and a prisoner in the yard, you'll have to open up the submenu. Make sure your prisoners are pumping iron. So you'll then want to send a guard to break up the fight, but figuring out how to do that without proper instructions is extremely frustrating. You can try to send prisoners to their cells by putting things in lockdown mode, but a lot of them won't retreat to their quarters and the ones that do come back out after a few seconds. They proceeded to beat the living snot out of each other. One time I wanted to break up a fight, so I tossed some tear gas at the warring prisoners, but nothing really happened.

It gets even hairier when you do know what to do, but your commands don't work. As a result, you'll often know what to do, but not how to do it. But all of this is severely hindered by a lack of an in-game tutorial. You'll do this from a top-down isometric camera angle. This means acquiring inmates, managing your economy, assigning people jobs, and yes, you'll sometimes need to issue a beat down. Throughout your time as the warden, you will be confronted with all of the tasks of running a prison.

Prison tycoon 5 review