

When a character’s turn comes you can order them to shoot, punch someone, hunker down, heal up, or watch a section of the battlefield to execute overwatch counter-shots.

There’s a turn order graphic at the top of the screen that lets you know which goon is going to goon next. When combat occurs your goons take cover - often in stupid places - and a turn-based shootout ensues. It’s a game rich with detail, but the admin and combat systems end up fighting one another. One moment you’re wading through a spreadsheet listing the status of every building in the block, the next you’re putting your gang leader into overwatch to shotgun a generic goon in a warehouse. Oh, I forgot to mention that there’s an entire RPG loot system that lets you acquire extra-special Tommy guns, body armour, health packs, and sticks of dynamite. When you mash so many genres together some elements can feel like unnecessary bloat. It’s a game that teeters on the edge of excellence, let down by a few key problems. This is a fascinating hybrid that feels like both Civ and Syndicate. If diplomacy fails a local gang will shoot you on sight, so you might want to take a detour around the block before you assault that derelict building you want to turn into an illicit brewery. Here you can see where rival gang members and police squads roam, and the game becomes gangster Pac-Man. When you’re not box-selecting your crew and clicking to send them from street to street, you can spin the mousewheel back to see a clean bird’s-eye view of every district in the city. Manage cookie settingsīrilliantly, you control your leader and their entourage from a detailed third-person perspective throughout, gathering your party and venturing forth on the pleasantly rendered streets of Chicago. To see this content please enable targeting cookies. You can pay your rival off intimidate them with some ‘20s tough talk or pull a gun and wade into their headquarters with a ragtag band of gangsters to take the place by force.

Empire Of Sin blends combat with detailed business management, and moonlights as a roleplaying game when your chosen kingpin has a face-to-face sitdown with a rival. I’d do the game an injustice to describe it as gangster XCOM though. Empire Of Sin lets you take the role of one of 14 criminal masterminds of the time - some real, some fictional - to take control of the city in XCOM-style turn-based combat. Speakeasies, casinos, and brothels are the money-makers of the moment. Amid the cigar smoke and whisky-breath, notorious criminals go to war over every street and every establishment. The city is dry, thanks to prohibition, but there’s a rich underworld of gangsters ready to sell you dodgy spirits on the sly. Welcome to Chicago in the 1920s the last known time that fedoras were actually cool. XCOM-style turn based combat in a world of prohibition-era gangsters that also incorporates business management and RPG elements.
