Empire Of Sin PC, PS4, Switch, Xbox One
Here is probably the single best-known piece of gangster lore: it wasn’t the gunfights or bigticket crime sprees which proved the undoing of Al Capone, but getting busted for tax evasion. Not so for this Capone, though. In the version of 1920s mafioso history playing out in our game of Empire Of Sin, old Scarface was brought down by a particularly malicious poison. Capone was standing on the steps of a safehouse freshly wrenched from the fingers of Mabel Ryley, a rival mob boss. Or, more to the point, ex-rival. Before she joined that growing pile, though, Ryley got our man in the side with a poisoned blade. And so the first man to be named ‘Public Enemy Number One’ by the FBI just keeled over in the streets of Chicago, and met an end as anticlimactic as his real-life counterpart’s.
Every part of Empire Of Sin – and there are many – exists to facilitate stories like this. It’s easy to think of it as a genre-bending game, but the correct label to apply isn’t ‘strategy’ or ‘RPG’ or any of the other modes it flits between. It’s ‘crime fiction’. At its best, the game weaves tales that blend history, myth and Mario Puzo.
Take the demise of our Capone. It came as a sudden full stop, but the full story traces back much further. We’d just stepped into the game’s version of Chicago, presented in the style of an isometric RPG, straight from the final turn-based skirmish of a lengthy mob war. That war, in turn, had been triggered in a diplomacy menu, where we picked through stats on all the local gangs – their strength, assets and relationship ratings – to identify the juiciest target. And those figures were fed by hours of prior decisions: sit-down meetings with Ryley, business arrangements and trades, the proximity of our speakeasies and back-room casinos to hers.
With so many elements at work, it’s probably not a huge surprise that, taken individually, none truly shines on its own merits. Take the tactical combat, which will account for most of your time with Empire Of Sin. When you’re leading your inner circle and tapping into your boss’ signature power, it’s a passable riff on XCOM et al. (These powers are a perfect example of how the game is happy to bend the truth, with magically ricocheting trick-shots and mind-control dust.) But a boss can’t always be on the front lines, and just as often you’ll be controlling rank-and-file soldati armed with nothing more exotic than a shotgun. These street fights are a perfect example of how the game’s various systems mesh – and how they can grind against one another.
Become too aggressive in your expansion and an AI-driven rival boss might take against you, launching an attack on one of your properties. But first they’ll have to get past the guards posted on the door. On paper, it’s an exciting consequence of your prior actions, and these street fights do have their charms. Most notably, the way they tie together the game’s disparate Chicagos. When outdoor combat is triggered, it casts a net across half a city block, and everything caught within gets dragged into a gridded turn-based arena. It’s a trick that never quite gets old.
The problem is, these big open spaces aren’t really designed for the kind of cover and flanking manoeuvres that make most tactics games tick. You might find yourself with fringe stragglers who spend the entire encounter running towards the action. And with no special abilities to turn the tide, fights between goons often feel pre-decided. The lack of an auto-resolve option here is baffling, especially given each fight displays a percentage chance of victory at the outset.
Every now and then, though, chance spits out an interesting story. A fight between a third gang and the police breaks out on the peripheries, or perhaps your party gets ambushed on its way to recruit a new gunfor-hire, who weighs up their options and slips away.
Occasionally, the story keeps running, unbroken, across the game’s various modes. Turn-based battles, chart-laden spreadsheets, conversations in cinematic close-up, a neighbourhood map that recalls Monopoly – they can feel like a stack of narrative dominoes, each action leading seamlessly to the next. More often, though, you’ll find yourself doing legwork to connect the dots. Those clashes between other gangs and the police leave us imagining subsequent weeks of raids – but if these consequences are simulated, the game doesn’t foreground them. Chicago is a sprawl, and that can produce storylines, but it can also obscure them.
We turn one of our speakeasies into a cop bar, knowing it could sour relationships with our fellow felons but liking the idea of the Chicago PD turning a blind eye to our own criminal activities. The resulting buffs fail to support this story, though. A booming neighbourhood gains a taste for more expensive whiskey; we upgrade and switch the supply, but never feel the effect. We try to trace the degradation of relations with another boss, but are interrupted by notifications informing us of changing affiliations before we can uncover any sense of cause and effect.
It might not have been taxes that brought down our Capone, but irregularities in the numbers get us in the end. As our empire grows, concerns about upgrades, diplomatic relations and serving the optimal whiskey feel increasingly distant. And so we go straight for the kill, eliminating one boss after another. It’s the baptism montage from The Godfather, and perhaps you could read our burned-out pattern recognition abilities as a proxy for Michael Corleone’s growing emotional distance. But this is precisely the kind of legwork we’ve lost the taste for. In borrowing from stories that are so often about one kind of ambiguity, Empire Of Sin creates another: the ambiguity of too many numbers and systems for any to feel significant.
The correct label to apply isn’t ‘strategy’ or ‘RPG’ or any of the other modes it flits between. It’s ‘crime fiction’