Empire of Sin looks like and seems like it should hit me right in my pretentious little black heart. The marketing videos, the screenshots, the writeups all drip with that 1920s gangster flavor. I think of men in nice hats machine-gunning men in other nice hats, dropping witty quips, and then doing a little more machine-gunning. Combine that with an XCOM-style strategy game and you’d think it’d be a can’t miss for yours truly. You’d be wrong.
Empire of Sin
Developer: Romero Games
Price: $40 USD
Platform: PC (reviewed), Playstation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch
MonsterVine was supplied with Steam code for review
At its heart, Empire of Sin does a little of everything and does none of it well. It’s kind of a business management/tycoon game where you run your shady empire, but it’s also kind of the aforementioned gangster strategy game but there’s also a little bit of a roleplaying game where your gangster has a sitdown with a rival and you try to talk things out. Or scare them. Or just pull out a piece and start owning scrubs.
And aesthetically, man, it is moody and dimly lit, full of rough men in cool hats and suspicious dames. Even the in-game fonts and maps are in that recognizable Art Deco font and style. You want to have a cigar and adjust your fedora before meandering around the city but, sadly, that look has been ruined by chuds and the kind of guys that say “FEEEEMALLLLES” to explain all their problems. But it’s still pretty stylish.
The city level is fun, too, in that you can zoom out and see everyone’s territory, so there’s always the risk of crossing the wrong guys or running into a cop raid. But maybe you want to do it. Maybe you want to take them out. Maybe it’s time to make a move, see?
There are a lot of fun gangsters, from Capone to people they just made up, and all of them have a lot of different abilities and upgrades. And they remember, too, they know whether they like you or they like the guy beside them, and managing your team’s various loves and hates could be an interesting little part of gang management.
But the idea of the game is let down by the game itself. The dialogue is two-dimensional, which is fine. Nobody watches gangster movies for witty repartee. But the lip-syncing and facial expressions are terrible. They’re incredibly bad. The AI in the aforementioned combat situations is just godawful. The ragdolling during combat is amusingly bad, taking us from gritty gangster sim to one of those Looney Tunes episodes where Bugs has a machine gun. I’m talking laugh out loud physical comedy.
I am sort of willing to overlook that XCOM-style percentage combat doesn’t really jibe with the setting. Like it doesn’t make a lot of sense that you riddle a guy in a bad suit with bullets but he shrugs it off because, I dunno, he just does. But you know what, sure, if it had been cool enough, I would’ve pretended he had Early Access to Kevlar. Mainly, it was obnoxious. The AI isn’t smart enough for advanced maneuvers but it can handle taking cover, which means your dudes and the other dudes are hiding behind cover chipping away at each other. Again, we descend into Naked Gun-style farce. (For the younger audience: Yes, that is OJ Simpson and yes, he was once known for something besides murder. Life is a rich pageant of surprises!).
The user interface has some…interesting decisions. Like you don’t upgrade buildings by clicking the building icon. You upgrade buildings under the dollar sign icon. Sure, man. That makes total sense. There’s no single screen for managing your empire, so you have to do it one by one. It gets old.
I am a perpetual apologist for Paradox Jank, but this one’s pretty janky even by Paradox standards. Your guys’ clothes regularly change colors when they die. Dudes disappear completely. Loading times sometimes take forever. There’s hard lock crashes.
Part of the problem is that Empire of Sin feels like a few different games and all of them are interesting, but mushing them together turns it into a mess. There’s an interesting tycoon-style game in managing underground Chicago…but if you want to do that, you probably don’t want to deal with the pretty crappy combat. It also suffers from the classic tycoon/management game problem where you eventually spend a good chunk of the early game waiting around to get enough money to do something interesting, doing that, then waiting around again.
On the other hand, If you like turn-based strategy, you probably don’t want to deal with the kind-of-wonky city manager game that’s sort of in here if you squint. And the combat isn’t good enough to be worth dealing with the terrible AI and bugs. There’s also the perpetual problem in these games of the maps being repetitive and uninteresting, but Empire of Sin manages to make them even more repetitive and uninteresting. The terrain isn’t destructible. Usually there’s a chokepoint. Get there first, set up an ambush. Blah blah blah. The only exception is when the boss has an ability or weapon that just wipes you before you can react, but that’s okay. Just reload and maybe they won’t use it the next time around.
If the idea still intrigues, maybe grab it on sale and wait for a slow time and check it out when they’ve got some patching in because there are some interesting ideas at work here. There’s even two or three interesting games that could be carved out of this one. I feel like I’m Monstervine’s Official Big Idea Lover and Jank Tolerator, but when there’s so many good games coming out…frankly, I don’t think I can tell you to slog through this weird, buggy game when Cyberpunk 2077 just came out, which is also weird, buggy, and one of the most anticipated games of the year. It’s not that I’m angry, it’s that I’m disappointed.
And I don’t like to be disappointed.
Boys, my Tommy Gun, if you please.
The Final Word
I know it was you, Fredo. You broke my heart. You broke my heart!
– MonsterVine Rating: 3 out of 5 – Average
