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It’s fun to simply wander around the city at night or to chat with your crew when you’re not fighting, but as with relationships, this represents such a small portion of the game that it doesn’t hugely improve the overall experience. Between the jazz music, good visuals, solid voicework and the fact that you can fully explore the city at your leisure, there’s a lot to enjoy when you’re not engaging with the actual gameplay. Joke’s on her: the fat is my natural body armour.Īdmittedly, the game also does a great job portraying its setting. Occasionally, this leads to moments like the one that started off the review, where you’ll have someone in your party leave combat or where your party will get a buff, but in reality they happen so rarely that the only reason it’s worth mentioning is because of the mediocrity of everything else in the game.
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For instance, a recruitable character may be in love with someone and will refuse to attack them in combat regardless of if they’re from a rival gang, but that same character may hate somebody else and will refuse to go on missions with them. In the game, the party members that you and your foes use to engage in combat are all drawn from a limited pool that has been created by the developer, and as such some of them have relationships with one another.
![empire of sin gangsters empire of sin gangsters](https://d1lss44hh2trtw.cloudfront.net/assets/editorial/2020/11/empire-of-sin-review-a-strategy-you-cant-refuse-character-select.jpg)
Really, the only way in which Empire of Sin stands apart from other titles, at least with its gameplay, is with its relationship mechanic. Since this isn’t hard at all due to the game’s combat, it makes this part of the game feel forgettable at best. Even on the game’s harder difficulties, it’s possible to never even open the menus that help you manage your empire as long as you’re constantly taking over new locations. As soon as you get the hang of the game’s combat, it’s always easier to kill just whoever gets in your way, after which you’ll be able to take control of their businesses which generate enough passive income to allow you to continue killing people. In your quest to take over Chicago, you can in theory micromanage each one of your individual rackets while also engaging in Civilization-style diplomacy with other gang leaders, but there’s little reason to bother doing this. They aren’t terrible, but they’re also completely superfluous. This sentiment extends to Empire of Sin’s strategy elements, too.
![empire of sin gangsters empire of sin gangsters](https://images.nintendolife.com/ed58b24f6071d/empire-of-sin.900x.jpg)
There’s just nothing more to it, which when considering that it’s a major portion of the game, means that the overall experience becomes forgettable very quickly. You use skills to devastate your foes, they use health packs to regen their hitpoints, and then eventually you win and get some loot. Each fight plays out exactly like you would expect it to, with you and your enemy taking turns to move around a grid-like map while occasionally shooting at one another with attacks that have a random percentage chance to hit. Although it isn’t as offensively terrible as it could be, it also doesn’t do anything different from the scores of other turn-based combat games available on the market. However, the problem is that, just like in those aforementioned titles, none of these core mechanics are very good, with the game's combat being the worst offender. To do this, you use XCOM-esque turn-based combat to fight rival factions, while also managing some grand strategy elements, like your relationship with the police and what quality of illegal liquor you’re using in the businesses that you control. You take control of one of around a dozen historical mob bosses in prohibition-era Chicago, where you’re tasked with taking over the city for your crime family. Like in Company of Crime, and Omerta: City of Gangsters before it, Empire of Sin has all of the elements to make for a great game. To put it differently, Empire of Sin is the latest attempt by a passively well-funded game developer to create an interesting and engaging crime management game. However, as soon as everyone was inside the beautifully rendered mob base, the enemy boss sniped my player character and I was dead after one turn. I didn’t care, though, because I still outnumbered the baddies 2:1. Then, just as I breached the stronghold, I got a notification on my screen telling me that my sniper wouldn’t target one of the enemy’s lieutenants because he was in love with her. I’d personally selected each one of the ten soldiers in my crew for their specific skills, they were all equipped with the best weapons that I could buy, and each one was leveled up from the past hour of me wiping out my rival’s rackets. As I entered the safehouse of a rival mob family, I was ready to end a gang war that had been raging since I started my campaign to take over 1920s Chicago as Al Capone.