I will cut straight to the chase: Empire of Sin would be a better game if it wasn’t so buggy.
This Prohibition-Era tactical combat and empire management game is pretty damn fun, but it’s marred by bugs, bugs, and more bugs. So many in fact, that regardless of what I write below, you should probably wait a few days before buying this game.
About one in every five missions I embarked on, I could not finish because of one bug or another keeping me from doing so.
It’s been a frustrating experience. Even more frustrating because the underlying game is an interesting mix of empire management, tactical combat, diplomacy, and even a bit of character development and a story that I just wasn’t expecting.
And I should probably mention the…
AAA Production Values
Everything about Empire of Sin feels like it’s game published by Paradox Interactive in 2020: it’s a great strategy game, its visuals and graphics actually make strategy look good, and good god, there’s a lack of Quality Assurance (yeah, I’ll discuss that even more later).
Save the characters’ lip-syncing, which is straight out of the early 2010s, the rest of the presentation here is above par. The 1920s city of Chicago looks exactly as I’d expect it to, with antique cars driving around the stone roads, the buildings mostly made of brick, the street signs and store signs all evoking that 1920s aesthetic. It’s all great.
In fact, even the user interface (UI) feels like they made it in the prohibition era. Not because it’s outdated, but because its font and typeface work incredibly well, and the flair around the UI elements fits perfectly.
Not to mention, the voice-over work is superb, even if it’s a bit repetitive in places, and all together, Empire of Sin looks, feels, and sounds exactly as it should.
That’s not an easy feat to accomplish, but Romero Games have nailed the presentation here.
Tactically Sound
While you’ll spend a lot of time organizing and managing your Empire of Sin, keeping tabs on your brothels, beer, and (under) bosses, you’re going to spend just as much, if not more, time in tactical combat.
It’s a good thing that it’s fun.
Combat plays out in a turn-based fashion, with an easy-to-understand timeline presented at the top of the screen to show which character goes in what order.
Each of the characters you can recruit in Empire of Sin belongs to one of the five professions: Doctors, Hired Guns, Enforcers, Con Artists, and Demolitionists. Each of them fills a unique role in combat and they’re all distinct enough that their combat roles feel important. You’ll need those Hired Guns for sheer firepower, but the Doctors are every bit as important with their ability to patch your gangsters up.
Empires of Sin displays its hit chances by a percentage and unlike XCOM, the percentages seem to matter. I almost always hit my mark when percentages were high enough that I should hit my mark. It feels much fairer than other shooting-based tactical games with that hit-chance system.
Weapon sounds are spot-on and each of them feel weighty enough to convey the sense that you’re in a violent gang fight.
Just be careful with your gangsters, as death in Empire of Sin is permanent. The added tension that this reality provides makes every move you make even more important, especially after you’ve inevitably invested many hours building your hit squads to meet their full potential.
Occasionally, you don’t actually kill your target, but cause them to become incapacitated, leading to an opportunity to finish them via special execution moves. They’re a fun, gory way to put an end to your opponents, while also providing an important resource, Notoriety, and a chance to buff your fellow gang members, while possibly scaring your opponents enough to panic.
All in all, the combat in Empire of Sin is bloody fun and since you’ll be spending so much time here, it’s a damn good thing it is. My only real qualm with the tactical combat is the lack of animation speed options. Sometimes, combat is 30-combatants deep and when you have to watch them all do their thing at regular speed, you’ll likely get as impatient as I did.
Give me speed options, damnit!
Running a Sinful Empire
As the name of the game suggests, Empire of Sin isn’t all about its tactical combat. After all, it’s money and fame (notoriety) you’re after. And in order to accumulate both, you must get your engine of sin up and running with brothels, speakeasies, hotels, breweries, casinos, and more, called rackets.
Each of these rackets generates income in different ways and for different clientele, so you’ll want a fair mixture of each business type. You’re also capable of upgrading each of these buildings, depending on their type, to provide better ambiance, better alcohol, better security, or to bring more folks in by spreading their word-of-mouth value.
These upgrade costs aren’t trivial, so you’ll need to invest wisely and create synergies between your different building types. Make sure you have enough breweries to produce the swill that you need to send to your speakeasies, but it also doesn’t hurt to have a casino around for all of your drunk patrons to squabble their money away at, lining your pockets with even more money.
Money isn’t everything, though, as you’ll need to generate Notoriety, too. To do so, you must be every bit as ruthless and cunning as the 1920s mobsters of real life. Increasing it through a variety of means, mainly through acquiring new rackets, completing new missions, hiring on new gangsters, and more. Higher levels of notoriety are required to bring on the best gangsters and the more you have, the lower the cost of your rackets, too.
Running these empires is one of the thirteen starting gang bosses, the most famous of which is Al Capone. However, you’ll also be able to choose from the likes of twelve others that are uniquely flamboyant, stereotypical, or downright psychotic as any mobster you’ve seen from a variety of different mediums set in this era.
They’re all mildly asymmetric, as each of them has a unique boss ability, empire bonus, and diplomatic bonus. My play-throughs as two of these different mob bosses provided a new mixture of gameplay focuses, missions, and interactions that I was pleasantly surprised to see.
There’s room for more wild asymmetry here and I hope that Romero Games adds more mob bosses in the future that perhaps play the game in dramatically different ways. Nevertheless, the bosses here offer just enough variety for a few different games that will each have their own unique outcomes and driving focuses.
Not-Awful Negotiations
Not something I expected to enjoy, as many games, especially of the 4X variety, have diplomatic systems that are, frankly, clumsy and boring. However, diplomacy in Empire of Sin isn’t half bad, as it allows for multiple different agreements with your rival gangs and can also lead to cinematic-like ‘sit-downs’ that are pretty fun to engage in.
Though I wouldn’t say that this system is particularly engaging, or groundbreaking, for that matter, I would say that it’s well done here, if not a bit average. I’m glad that Romero Games understood that this aspect of empire management can’t be overlooked and as previously mentioned, the sit-downs are pretty cool:
Variety is the Spice of Life
Along the way, as you work to build your empire, you’ll be prompted with missions that pop up either as you reach certain milestones, when you’re met with certain characters, or randomly as the game progresses. Admittedly, there are quite of few of them that present themselves in your average 8-to-10-hour games.
My main qualm with these missions, however, is the lack of variety in their objectives. Many of them simply require you to manufacture or accumulate a certain amount of the variety of resources within the game. Others ask you to go to a certain racket, meet with someone, and then either be given another objective by that person or make a decision to kill them, etc.
There are about ten different mission types, all perhaps worded a bit differently, but after 30 hours, those missions became really stale for me. I wish there were some real surprises among them, but each of them played out much like the last one did and it left me feeling pretty bored with them pretty quickly.
There is Some Ugly
As I mentioned in my opening words, this game needs an exterminator the likes of which I haven’t seen in a long, long while. Granted, a game with this many moving parts is bound to have some issues, but it’s unbelievably frustrating to lose saves, lose gangsters, get stuck on missions, and experience a variety of the other issues that I experienced in my 30 hours with Empire of Sin.
Just as bad as the bugs is the frequently incompetent tactical AI. Sometimes, I’d see the enemy combatants make smart moves as they maneuvered to flank my characters and utilize their weapons to the their greatest effect. Other times, they’d move out in the open, directly into my line of fire, and make moves from there that seemed completely illogical.
These, too, could be bugs, as mostly, I felt as though the AI was making moderately-intelligent-to-pretty-damn-smart moves. Even so, there were times that stood out to me where the AI was making such brain-dead moves that I feel compelled to complain about them here.
The real ugly here, though, are the show-stopping bugs. I know I wasn’t the only reviewer that experienced these, either, as I’ve been in communication with others that have been playing this “review ready” build. I sincerely hope that there’s a Day One patch (or Day Two or Three) that can nullify a lot of the issues I experienced.
Otherwise, Empire of Sin is a really good game that could be excellent with fewer bugs and better mission variety.
