Empire of Sin has been on my radar for a long time. I didn’t immediately spring on it at release because I wasn’t in the mood for an XCOM-esque game and the reviews colored it as a game that was best to wait for a sale on. I finally caught it on a deep sale last month.

The game throws you into the height of Prohibition Chicago as a mob boss looking to take their slice of the pie. I didn’t expect this game to pull from real history outside of the setting, but the player characters you play as, your boss, are actual 1920s mobsters. There is only a few that are fictional characters. Of course, the biggest name everyone knows is Al Capone, and I couldn’t bring myself to play as anyone else for my first playthrough.

The city of Chicago is broken down into neighborhoods, you can set how many neighborhoods during setup. These serve as your small open world spaces. Each one has a different aesthetic to reflect an aspect of the city; docks, downtown, skid row, industrial, old town, etc. While they have a lot of the same building types in each zone, there is enough little touches to delineate them. And all of the zones capture the 1920s feeling. You play from an isometric viewpoint, so they there’s not as much detailing required as a 1st or 3rd person game, but they still went the extra mile.

In each neighborhood you can open up 4 types of businesses. Breweries, which is a production building that creates the illegal hooch your empire is based on, speakeasies where you sell your illicit booze on the downlow, casinos which posses variable ROIs, and brothels where, well, you know. Most of your booze goes to the speakeasies, but brothels and casinos also use a small amount. You can go inside these businesses and each one has a different look and as you upgrade them you see it in their visuals. Your speakeasy goes from having wooden crates as tables to proper furniture and a live band.

The music is also great Roaring 20s Jazz. Each neighborhood has it’s own theme, as do each of the four businesses when you enter their interiors. Unfortunately, even if the music is good, there’s not a wide variety. After a few hours of combat and general playing, you’ll’ve heard most of the soundtrack several times over. It’s very much a gauge of this game’s budget.

This game has the feeling of a project with more ambition than budget. While I knew from the ads it was an XCOM game, that’s only half the game. There’s also a business management game in here. When not fighting other mob bosses for territory your time is spent in an overworld view managing all your businesses and crew, making sure your income outweighs your expenses. It’s not as intense as an actual management game, like Cities Skylines. It actually reminded me of the management screens from Godfather 2, which seems fitting given the shared content genre. You can’t completely ignore this system, but it’s also not super deep. There’s also the sit-downs with other bosses. These feel like the Civilization diplomacy screens. Most bosses are more than willing to work out agreements with you than go straight to war. You can eliminate bosses by buying them out, meaning you don’t have to kill everyone.

The combat side of the game is fun, because again, it’s just XCOM. There’s not much new here to differentiate it. Empire of Sin is no where as tough as XCOM, but I also played on the 2nd easiest mode because of my XCOM experience. Characters can still die, but that only happened to me once. You are fighting other humans with guns, not aliens with crazy weapons so there’s not a lot of weapons that can wipe you out after you start to level up. That is if you remember to still play this as a tactical, turn-based, shooter. Standing in the middle of an exposed room will get you killed. Keeping your crew all bundled up can be dangerous too thanks to explosives. Your boss is your first playable character and he can hire a crew of up to 10 mobsters. I was surprised you could bring such a large group into battle, especially when most games limit you to 4-5. Granted that large number may be due to the fact that you can assign some of your gangsters to serve as lieutenants in neighborhoods you’ve conquered, but I never used that feature, because I needed all hands on deck when taking on other mob bosses.

Each gangster fits into a category; Demolitions, Gunman, Enforcer, Medic, and Conman. Each are proficent with certain weapons and have a skill tree with unique class skills. Most of your crew are more 20s archetypes than stereotypical gangsters. There's flappers, cowboys, old maids, boxers, revolutionaries, and even an old Confederate. They each have a unique enough personality that spices up the game vs if you just had 5 nearly identical wiseguys in suits. Your boss has extra skills and abilities you can unlock. By the game’s end, with the chain kill ability, Capone could clear most of a room before anyone else had a turn.

I wished the items system was a little more constrained. Each gun category only has 4 guns in them. So you may be finding 1911s all over the place, but what matters is it’s gear color. I would much rather they just make weapon progression a little slower and make what the gun is matter, not it’s color. The black market shop also has very little to sell. It does the “store refreshes every x mins.” thing, but it’s always too bare bones to be useful, especially in regards to consumables & armors.

The voice acting is rough. Capone is voiced by Paladin Danse, who does a fine job. The line delivery during the sit-downs are a little stilted and every mobster only has a few canned lines of dialogue that you will hear ad nauseam. There’s a few cutscenes with some real rough animations. Again, it shows off the budget nature of this game.

All in all, Empire of Sin is a game that tries to be two games, and as a jack of all trades, it doesn’t master either. There’s an obvious commitment to the 1920s vibe, but the gameplay holds back the overall experience. They want you to go back and replay with different bosses who give you different bonuses, but the rest of the game isn’t engaging enough for a 2nd playthrough soon.