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, hostile takeovers, and diplomacy or confrontation with other gangs also makes for a mostly engaging gameplay loop. Empire of Sin doesn’t always keep it riveting. There are sometimes lengthy stretches of r...

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 you can’t change my mind.

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.

Video games and mobsters go together like a dirty rat and a pair of cement shoes. Mafia, Yakuza, GTA – numerous popular franchises promise to give players a taste of the gangster life, although the majority of them tend to focus on action and melodrama. Most games about gangsters don’t show how they actually built their criminal empires. Enter Empire of Sin, the new Prohibition Era mobster sim from Romero Games (specifically, Brenda Romero, best known for her work on the Jagged Alliance series).

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 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 this promise is held back by copious technical problems, game-breaking bugs and management and combat systems that feel half-baked and scrappy. There are more patches and updates planned and we desperate...

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 so tedious. The criminal enterprise management is poorly balanced and tediously slow due to a combination of game speed and bad interface. Top it all off with bugs, glitches, and janky performance issu...

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 consideration. Empire of Sin is a massive disappointment.