Empire of Sin

A refreshingly deep and customizable turn-based tactics game lets you reign supreme in a 1920s criminal empire.

There’s a lot going on in Empire of Sin. Romero Games and Paradox Interactive build quite a hybrid of business management, character growth, and turn-based combat, and the 1920s Prohibition-era backdrop makes for an interesting story. The gang leaders are varied in so many ways between their business, combat specialties, and personal stories. Meanwhile, the overall flow of business expansion, host...

The order was given. My trigger men were going to hit the safehouse of a rival gang. I had with me my lucky bat and two of my best guys, both of them armed with tommy guns (or Chicago typewriters if you’re feeling vulgar). We entered and all hell broke loose. One of my guys was left bleeding, so I sent his buddy to go bail him out… or I tried to.

However, unless you just really need something new to try out, I might wait for either a sale or to see what Romero Games does to update it post-launch. There were moments where I had an absolute blast, but the entire package is a bit lacking. So, just like my sad attempt at cooking my own Thanksgiving dinner back in college, essentially. To my credit, Spam is a valid substitution for turkey and y...

It's hard to ignore the need for a little extra TLC to smooth out the edges, but the fundamentals of an arresting tactics-and-strategy game about building a criminal empire are in place.

Empire of Sin has a lot of potential. Unfortunately, it's buggy and full of odd design choices, never really reaching the heights it sets for itself.

Empire of Sin left-field pairing of 1920s prohibition storyline with high-level strategy game tactics works so well that it’s almost a surprise nobody thought of it sooner. It turns out that the world of bootlegging is a weirdly perfect match for a genre that’s all about managing operations and carefully plotting out each move. Who would have thought?

Empire of Sin is a promising strategy game but one that feels woefully incomplete. I can't recommend it, but I can recommend following it's hopeful transition into something genuinely wonderful.

A mountain of issues crushes this ambitious management game.

Empire of Sin is undoubtedly an excellent idea, a clever meshing together of management sim and turn-based tactical action that's set in a hugely compelling era of Chicago's criminal history. There are some cool mechanics here, too; the well-executed overworld map of the town, the gangster black book with its complex relationships and those tense sit-downs with rival ganglords. However, all of thi...

All the good ideas and strong 1920s atmosphere in Empire of Sin amount to nothing in the end. The tactical combat has strong bones and some clever design, but fails to live up to its promise due to repetitive, lackluster maps and wildly unbalanced abilities. The strategy layer is shallow and the many ways to roleplay feel meaningless when there is a clear easiest path to victory and the rest are s...

Empire of Sin is a poor and skeleton-thin management game at its core with complicated systems, menus, and tutorials that do a poor job at getting you acclimated to the experience. Add on top of that a library worth of bugs that force you to restart, ruin pivotal moments of the game, and just make the experience more frustrating and you have a game that is not worth even worth a slight bit of cons...