Empire of Sin Has Many Ideas but Stumbles on Execution

Chicago, 1920s. Rain, grime, trench coats, and class with a bit of sleaze thrown in (or is it the other way around?). The newly minted 18th Amendment has a stranglehold on the free flow of alcohol. Someone has to make a fortune on the back of the illegal trade, and by wits and by force it’s going to be you—taking on the role of a mob boss and their crime family.

Empire of Sin is from Romero Games, founded by gaming industry legend John Romero and his wife, Brenda, an industry veteran in her own right. It is a unique mix of turn-based combat, business management simulation, and role-playing game. Much of your time is spent in the overworld, divided into several neighborhoods that you can move about in real time with a jazzy big band soundtrack accompanying it all. Buildings are occupied by various crime families, and it’s your ultimate goal to take over other people’s and install your own distillery, casino, brothel, speakeasy, or hotel.

You can upgrade these rackets in various ways—security, ambiance, alcohol quality, and so on. This and factors like shifting neighborhood prosperity levels, mob wars, and how many members you have on the payroll all play into your weekly earnings. There are literal spreadsheets to analyze the profitability of your criminal empire, though the layouts can be confusing, especially as you gain more rackets, and could be better handled with the use of tooltips or an index.

Besides money, your crime family needs members, and as you become more notorious, you can bring on more of them. The system is fairly robust—recruitable members have backstories, loyalty ratings, combat traits, weekly takes, and friendships and rivalries with other characters in the city. This makes it feel like your family is made up of a diverse cast of characters rather than faceless goons—among my associates were a recent immigrant from Spain and an elderly Civil War veteran.

As with any gangster flick, there are some problems you can only solve with violence. Combat in Empire of Sin is a turn-based tactical system much like the XCOM games. Cover and angles are important, and weapons have special abilities. All the classics are here, like tommy guns, short-barreled shotguns, and various World War I surplus. There’s a loot system, so it’s kind of weird for my mobsters to be fretting over whether this purple-quality revolver is better than the blue-quality revolver, but it works in a way.

What does not work most of the time is the combat maps. They’re clunky and cluttered, and conducive to combat. The enemy AI isn’t the smartest; even when armed with ranged weapons, it will often charge straight toward you, creating a chaotic kill zone in one area of the combat. Line of sight is sometimes funky, resulting in being able to shoot through an area that looks as if you shouldn’t be able to and vice versa. If you’re involved in a war with another crime family (which is the quickest way to expand your turf), their goons will repeatedly attack your rackets, constantly triggering tedious fights.

Bugs are also present. One glaring one for example: A mission tasked me with taking over a distillery in order to get some equipment for a distillery of my own. When I entered the front door, the objective was marked complete. I was able to hand in the mission without ever firing a shot or taking control of the rival distillery.

Overall, things feel disjointed. Remember, this is John Romero—at his best, he gave us Doom, Quake, and Wolfenstein 3D. At his worst, he was about to make us his bitch with Daikatana. He’s proven to be an expert at level design, so I was curious to see what his direct involvement in Empire of Sin was. According to the credits, he was busy, billed as studio director, project manager, senior game designer, audio director, and sound engineer.

It’s a shame, because Empire of Sin has great pulpy mobster attitude and a blend of gameplay that in theory should be great. I’ll always be interested in what Romero is working on by virtue of his previous work, but this but needed more time in the oven. The business management needs to be more focused, the combat tightened up, and some bugs ironed out—only then might it be worth sinking some serious time into.

Empire of Sin is available on PC, Mac, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch.

Courtesy of Paradox Interactive