Empyre: Lords of the Sea Gates

Empyre: LordS of the Sea Gates offers an innovative style of gameplay to liven up the RPG nature of the game. The writing is well above average and does a great job of setting the appropriate tone and, at times, is quite witty. Combat is approachable in the early stages, but becomes increasingly difficult as the game progresses.

After delving into the game in its release form for several hours, I found I greatly enjoyed the game and felt that it had lived up to the expectations set by what was available in the preview. The game is unique and enjoyable with a compelling story and diverse characters that embody a complex culmination and interaction of various subcultures that deviate from each other while simultaneously holding true to what I would imagine is the nature of New York in that time era.

Real talk? I’ve tried for weeks to get into Empyre: Lords of the Sea Gates, but the clunky controls, obtuse UI, and incomplete concepts made it impossible for me to engage. The concept and setting for Empyre is top shelf, but the gameplay came out a little water logged.

Emypre: Lords of the Sea Gates had one of the coolest ideas I’d heard of all year. A concept in which 1900s New York had its technological Golden Age washed away as the city drowned in a massive flood. What remains are those skyscrapers that stood tall enough to weather the storm, as well as those people lucky enough to climb above the waterline before it was too late. With a little bit of Fallout and a little bit of Bioshock, Empyre could have been a unique IP worth diving head-first into.

Empyre: Lord of the Sea Gates crafts a marvelous world and then squanders it with poor gameplay and a mediocre audio/visual presentation.

With a story set in an alternate, steampunk-inspired Earth in the early 1990s, Empyre is a game that offers many fresh ideas throughout as players set off on an adventure to restore New York's drinking water. But are new ideas always a good thing?