By: Corey Lack
So, I recently got the new Empire of Sin video game that was released by Paradox Interactive. The game is a real time strategy where the player takes control of one of forty-four mob bosses, some historical and some are fictional. The player then helps their chosen mobster create a mafia from the ground up, hiring skilled lieutenants, creating rackets, and dealing with enemies, either other gangsters or various police officers.
I decided to have the most infamous mobster himself as my character, Alphonse Capone. He, along with the other mobsters, have unique passive skills and a single activated skill that they can use in battle. Each of the characters have their own story mode as well as their overall plan to take over Chicago. Capone, for example, wanted to work with a friend from New York to deal with a mutual threat.
Gameplay-wise, it’s a little jumbled. There is a lot going on even if you make the minimum amount of enemy AI factions. While you are out of combat, you move around the world going to different places and looking for missions and loot, but in combat, it becomes turn-based akin to the XCOM series. When you’re working on your different rackets, there are a lot of menus that you will have to keep flipping through, but because they’re different and there’s no way that I’ve found to go from one menu to the other, you have to close it out and open it back up to the menu you want. Also, explaining how the taxis worked would not have gone amiss. There were many times where I was trying to use them to change neighborhoods and nothing would happen. It wasn’t until I tried to use them as destinations instead of starting points that I figured it out. Also, there was one major and annoying bug that kept popping up. Among your racket choices, you can create hotels to provide bonuses to your established businesses, but the hotels would be randomly sold off without my input.
There’s not really much more to say about the game beyond that. The acting and the writing were minimal and the world was similarly minimally built. All-in-all, it’s a decent game and will likely be better when they hammer out the bugs. I’d give it eight raided speakeasies out of 10.
