City of Gangsters, by developer SomaSim, is a single-player turn-based economy-focused mafia management game set during the American prohibition. The player arrives in an iconic city, such as Chicago or Pittsburgh, with nothing but some money, family connections, and leftover alcohol in their uncle’s or aunt’s garage. Using these resources wisely, the eventual goal is to be the Godfather of the entire city, dwarfing any competitors.
Unlike most mafia management games, violence is better avoided in City of Gangsters with the game’s focus being the financial and social sides of the organization. Shows of force only increase the number of people that dislike you, real power comes from granting and cashing in valuable favors and growing a network of trust.
The Quests for Power
The game always starts with a few friendly connections, a small number of sellable goods, and minimal knowledge about alcohol production. It is a tough situation with mostly forced actions to raise money and start your first industry. Once an initial distillery is set up, the game slowly starts to open up as you explore the map, meet new people, and start accruing favors. Growing a network of people requires getting to know them and their families and friends.
Meeting a stranger is usually of little use, as people typically do not make illicit deals with people they do not know. Meeting someone new through a friendly introduction gives you a relationship boost and often a free favor. The relationship level shows how much the person trusts you, a basic level of trust is necessary for a working business relationship. A trusting person is also more likely to comply with your suggestion that they make small monthly donations to the neighborhood protection budget. The more you trade with a person and their family, the closer you grow and the more favors you can ask of them.
Aside from trading, a friend in need can give you a quest to help them or their family with varying rewards. Helping by with renting a party space can net you leftover alcohol, bringing crowbars to a break-in can give you cheap vehicles, and delivering your finest produce is often paid for well above market value. The best quests teach you new skills, from upgrading your existing distilleries, managing garages, ways to distill more rare liquors to creating bootlegging operations and starting speakeasies. Because of the sheer amount of different alcohols and materials in the game, you can comfortably play for hundreds of turns doing hundreds of quests and still not run out of new skills to learn. It also serves as a good progression mechanic, locking away more advanced techniques behind mini-missions.
The variety of quests is impressive and they are always accompanied by believable stories. The rewards are balanced and make the questing a worthwhile investment. At times, you do run the risk of taking quests to deliver something that you cannot buy or produce yet, which can be a little disconcerting at first, but actually helps the sense of achievement when you gain the ability to complete them by progressing in the game. Quests They assist with deciding development priorities, whether it is better to expand the network of friends to find new helpful quests, scout the map to locate sellers of new basic goods, or invest in setting up new businesses to produce a new kind of alcohol. The only complaint on the quests is that the dialogue often omits the actual task you are about to undertake so you do not always know what you are agreeing to or whether it has a time limit.
The favors can be cashed in for introductions to new people, finding empty and affordable buildings for new businesses, keen out-of-work individuals to employ, getting invites to special events, getting the local constabulary to look the other way, and quite a few other useful things. The power of these favors is immense and this is further stressed by the difficulty of gaining them. You need to put effort, time, and money into most relationships before they can bloom into multiple useful favors. The balance between effort and reward is definitely a precarious one, but the City of Gangsters has managed it on the most part. What keeps it from being superb are the little bugs that you notice now and then, usually costing you a favor without any payoff.
Quenching the Thirst
Illicit alcohol is the heart of any game set during the prohibition. Over the course of the game, you will gain access to new buildings either through favors or quests. Sometimes these buildings have a front business that will produce something useful to you, such as grapes or ice, other times it can be more difficult to find a good use for, such as furniture, or nothing at all. The back rooms you can use for storage or, more preferably, for setting up an illegal business for either producing, smuggling, or consuming alcoholic beverages. You can also set up garages to increase your motor pool.
The production or consumption rate of each business depends on its size. You generally start small and learn how to upscale your production or decrease the time or resources it requires to produce each batch through quests. Experienced building managers can also help speed production along.
While you can consume the alcohol you produce in one of your businesses, which can net you more money, it means you are not selling your goods to the kind people of the city. That can have negative consequences to your relations with them, which in turn can slow down your expansion to new regions of the city. Money alone is of little use if nobody is willing to sell anything to you. It becomes a balancing act of profit vs relationships. Quite a few quests also require you to deliver some of your products to an interested party to increase your relationship with them and to gain other benefits. At the same time, overproducing a single type of alcohol will mean you have to throw some away to make more space in your warehouses.
The basic idea of supply and demand has to be the backbone of any economy-focused game, so it is no surprise to see it here. What I am surprised by is that all prices are fixed, flooding the market with simple moonshine does not lower the price of it, nor does not enabling any access to gin to raise its value. You can offer to sell below market value or buy above it to increase any relationships, but that is about it in terms of price fluctuation. A fixed price for everything makes the game significantly more predictable and stable, but at the same time, it reduces a lot of motivation for diversifying your production.
Deadly Competition
Around your growing organization, other similar-minded individuals are trying to make their own fortunes. These can range from single-street gangs to mafias that rival your own. Large gangs cause serious problems with their desire to control the city. They will often be aggressive towards you, attacking your storefronts and intimidating your friends. If they attack your crew, you really have a problem on your hands. As a rule, you want to avoid armed conflict at every opportunity, because fighting has multiple negative consequences.
First and foremost, your crew can be wounded. This causes supply disruptions for you since they cannot work while they are being treated. Not every location enables treating wounds so getting any wounded members of your crew to safety can be a serious issue. If a member of your crew happens to die, their loved ones will not look kindly to that. If a member of another crew happens to die in a fight with you, their loved ones will refuse to trade or work with you after you take over the districts they live in. To grow successfully you need people to work with you, not against you.
Another problem is that any fight, large or small, will increase the heat of the region. This is reflected in a more active presence of police officers nearby. While having the police arrest your competitors can be very advantageous, you want to avoid getting arrested yourself since even if they have nothing to charge you or your crew with, they will happily confiscate everything in your vehicles. When I say everything, I mean everything. From money and alcohol to something as innocent as a load of baseball bats you were totally going to donate to the local baseball team. The only way to keep the police off your back is to become friends with them and give a regular donation to benefit the city. A small donation will not do, so it is wiser to stick to crimes lesser than murder until you have the wherewithal to fund the local police.
A large advantage competing gangs have against you is that if their leader dies in a drive-by, another member of the crew takes over with barely any consequence. If the player character dies, the game ends. This is not one of those Paradox games where you can bravely throw your character into the line of fire, knowing that you get to continue as your own heir. In City of Gangsters, if you die, you die. Since even the most basic pistol is capable of killing any person with a single shot, having the player character in a fight is one of the riskiest things you could do. To avoid having to risk your own life and limb, you need to have a trusted crew at your side.
The main source of finding potential hires is by calling in favors from friends and family. Aside from that, local hoodlums can sometimes be persuaded to join your gang for a modest fee. Hiring someone’s close friend or relative automatically makes them like you a little more. The members of your crew can serve as building managers who make illicit production more efficient, as friendly faces who give you a relationship bonus when talking to strangers or competitors, as delivery drivers going through a defined route gathering supplies and selling alcohol automatically, or as muscle who protect your areas and are ready to attack any aggressor. Over time they, like the player character, gain experience and become more effective at their tasks.
The risks involved in open warfare usually far outweigh the benefits. It keeps you in a constant state of suspense when you have hoodlums or competing gangs anywhere near your territory. Since you cannot always avoid a fight, moments of having to completely rethink your logistics and defense planning change the pace of the game suddenly and almost always at inconvenient times. Yet, the fact that there is a change, there is something new and different to do now and then keeps you on your toes, keeps the routine of clicking through destinations from really setting in. Personally, I count that as a good thing. In fact, I really like that aggression is an undesirable option.
Reality Beckons
One of the charming elements of the world is that it is based on real life. The United States has always been a melting pot of different nations and the game reflects that. It is easier to gain respect with people of your own nationality, though depending on the city it may be easier or harder to find people of your kind. The relative distribution of different nationalities in each city is based on actual census data from the 1920s, meaning you will meet the same kinds of people in the game as you would have met if you were a real-time traveler visiting the early days of Prohibition. Beyond the map generation, each family has its own family tree with some members dying, others coming of age. The city lives and evolves as time goes by, making it really feel like a world worth spending time in.
Each available city has its own set of buildings in the appropriate style. From the churches and factories to the residential buildings, each city feels different even by its looks. Each location is geographically based on the real-life location, with the rivers being where one would expect them to be, but all the streets and districts are randomly generated at the start of each game. So having the cities look different without predefining too much is a really nice touch.
Another real-life aspect the developers wanted to take into account was the different prevalence of specific types of hooch in different parts of the country. This is reflected in some cities having “exclusive” types of alcohol that no other city has. With all alcohol consumption being randomly generated at the start of the game, every game will be different in terms of the types of alcohol you can or want to produce and sell. This adds to replayability because you never really know what you are about to get in the city or around your starting location. Not that replayability is a huge issue for the game.
In the Preview article, I compared City of Gangsters to the likes of Patrician 2 because of its focus on trading, logistics, and manufacturing with only small moments of violence. The comparison goes deeper due to the game length – each turn constitutes a single week, the Prohibition lasted for over 10 years. While the time it takes to complete a turn varies, we are talking about dozens if not hundreds of hours to complete a single game. While there are objectives that are evaluated at the end of Prohibition that measure your impact on the city, these are soft targets that you can ignore and play your own game in any way you want. If you desire, you can even continue beyond Prohibition without anything changing other than the objectives are no longer evaluated. Honestly, I cannot imagine actually finishing a game without first wanting to try out other cities and replaying the beginning phases. The fact that I want to try out other cities and replaying the beginning phase instead of dropping the game altogether is worthy of respect.
Verdict
City of Gangsters is a fine mafia management game with a strong focus on the economic side of illegal alcohol running. The game mechanics are solid and fun, the balance of the game is finely tuned and the production value is high. Despite its calm demure, it is sprinkled with moments of suspense and the in-game goals give a real sense of achievement. The main gripes I have with it are rather minor, with some important information being revealed a little too late or a small handful of non-disruptive bugs remaining in the game being the main ones. If I were to ask SomaSim to add something to the game it would probably be more tunes for the background music as the current music gets a little old over dozens of hours of playtime.
I used to have balance, bugs, and user experience concerns based on the Preview from the beginning of the year, but the developer has definitely heard the criticisms, and everything major has been fixed and greatly improved upon to make this release worthy of being the full release.
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