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Preview: Empire Of Sin is a seamless blend of four different gangster gamesThat’s how mafia works
That’s how mafia works
But after just a day with it, I have high hopes thatEmpire Of Sin, the extraordinary prohibition gangster simulation coming from Romero Games on December 1, is going to hit the big time on both fronts.
Watch on YouTube
Watch on YouTube
What you’ve got here, is your classic game of four halves. Empire Of Sin is a stats-based management game, about running the speakeasies, breweries, brothels and casinos of your chosen mob. It’s a turn-based squad tactics game, where you fight to take premises off other gangs, or for any one of a dozen other reasons. It’s an RPG, where you lead your growing bunch of naughties around the city streets, pursuing various story quests, and tooling them up with new weapons, equipment and skills. And of course, it’s a gang-based grand strategy game about taking over a city, where its heritage as a Paradox publication becomes immediately recognisable in diplomacy, warfare and so on.
And there’s more. It veers into being a close-up narrative game during boss-on-boss sitdowns, into citybuilding territory with its building upgrades, and even into the realm ofCrusader Kingswith its dozens of recruitable gangsters, all of whom have grudges, affections, ambitions and personalities.
Like a really menacing version of Guess Who.
It’s a lot, is what I’m saying. But none of its strands feels like a minigame, or a darling lingering long after it should have been killed. Each of them is fleshed out to the extent where I couldn’t name any one as the “main” component of the game. In X-COM, for example, there’s a clear distinction between the big-picture Geoscape segments, and the episodic bouts of squad fighting on the ground, which are the clear soul of the game.
Delicious, forbidden whiskey data.
I had a lot of fun renaming premises to things like “absolutely no beer” or “couldn’t be a pub”.
If I’m lukewarm on anything, it’d be the combat game. There’s nothing bad about it, and indeed many elements are really good: each boss, for example, has one ludicrously powerful special ability that defines the way fights play out. My boss, Maggie Dyer, was a really hard circus lady who could drag enemies towards her with a whip. Beyond the actual tactics, there’s some brilliantly rowdy fight jazz that plays in battle, and the battlefields - both exterior and interior - are awash with the slightly larger than life, mega-moody period charm of the game at large.
Cracking stuff.
That doesn’t mean I’m dubious, it just means I have no idea. There were whole game systems I was still discovering at the end of my session, and I was far from developing an instinct for even the ones I fully understood. I have a good deal of faith, however, that if Empire Of Sin has been made to function at all then it has every chance of lasting the distance. And for all that’s said about post-launch patching, this seems an extremely reasonable case for the application of small tweaks over a long time, as unforeseen interactions crop up for regular players.
Presuming it does all hold up, I think this game really is a bit special. Prohibition-era Chicago is such a phenomenal setting, and it’s one that I’m surprised hasn’t been used more over the years, given its mythic significance. A strategy game, a management game, a squad battler or an RPG taking place in Capone’s town would all have been great prospects. To get all four at once is a real feast.
