Empire of Sin

First published in GRIND Ediția Definitivă, pages 12–15.

PLAYED ON PC · RELEASE DATE 01 DECEMBER 2020 · PUBLISHER PARADOX INTERACTIVE · DEVELOPER ROMERO GAMES LTD.

TOMMY GUN, WHISKY, AL CAPONE,

CIVILIZATION, X-COM AND MAFIA...

It sounds like a delicious cocktail you'd offer to the mink-collared lady delicately flicking ash from her cigarette, careful not to stain her silk gloves, which you later hope to gently pull off her slender fingers with your teeth. But all that aromatic smoke of tobacco, chestnuts and cherry wood…

…dissipates: before you stands an old dear who couldn't be bothered to change out of her dressing gown and slippers when she popped down to the boozer to buy loose cigarettes… and that cocktail you were about to offer the lady? A Tanita liqueur served in a filthy shot glass, where you can vaguely make out a layer of seed husks and cigarette ash floating on the surface.

Whenever I'm dealing with a game whose announcement gets me wildly excited, I try to steer clear of any teasers and trailers. That way I can enjoy what it has to offer more easily, and at the same time I don't end up building expectations so high that they'll only disappoint me later. And somehow, Empire of Sin still managed to disappoint: not through unrealistic expectations, but through the immense potential it had and squandered, coupled with a total lack of imagination and originality.

At the start of the game you're offered a range of 1920s criminal personalities. Some historical, others fictional, but all of them useful for turning Chicago into an empire built on a foundation of oak barrels that bring prosperity right up to the end of Prohibition in 1933. Personally, I chose to give Al Capone a wide berth – thinking he was too stereotypical. Besides, the satisfaction of taking over the reins of his empire later in the game would have been all the greater. I don't know what pushed me to pick Maggie Dyer – perhaps a kind of empathy for the lack of female character representation in the industry that everyone's been going on about for a while, perhaps out of respect for Brenda Romero, whose artistic vision was materialised in Empire of Sin, or simply because she's a little old lady tattooed from head to toe who uses the whip not just in her BDSM escapades, but also to bring the lions of the circus she runs to heel, along with the 'lions' of the criminal underworld.

Once past the character-select menu, I'm hit with a brick of cinematic sequences in which Maggie Dyer recounts details of her past to her driver. Why did I say brick?

Because that's exactly how it felt when the combination of sub-mediocre voice acting and amateur puppeteer animations wrecked any attempt at immersion in the romanticised atmosphere of the period.

I hoped it was just an isolated case, that I'd simply started on the wrong foot and that things would eventually settle down once I got to indulge in the turn-based tactical combat, in micromanaging my empire or in the diplomatic decisions I'd make about my rivals. That wasn't the case.

It's time to talk at length about Empire of Sin's combat system, so if you're reading this paragraph on the throne, I suggest you wipe and park your backside on something more comfortable before you go numb. Ready? Good. Combat is copy-paste X-COM 2. That's it. No, not quite. It's a copy-paste of X-COM 2 not only in terms of mechanics – every gangster occupation, along with their abilities and actions, is a perfect one-for-one match. What's missing, though, are important elements of the game's realism, such as destructible objects or walls. I can be standing face to face with an enemy, separated only by a lousy chair. I can spit a whole cartridge of lead from my Tommy gun into the rival gangster, and yet the idiot and that mangy chair of his come out safe and sound thanks to unfortunate RNG, the cover system and the furniture's invulnerability to any outside force. What's more, in X-COM you'd sometimes get mini-cutscenes when a team member changed position or executed an enemy – little touches that help you stay down there on the battlefield with your soldiers, rather than the idea of being a detached observer keeping watch from a bird's-eye view. In Empire of Sin, out of 20 melee attacks, 17 of them play the attack animation first while the enemy stands stiff as a board, and only after my man has finished slicing the kebab off the rotisserie does the enemy remember it's time to scream in pain and for that sweet ketchup to gush out; for the other 3 attacks, it happens exactly the other way round.

I compared Empire of Sin to the Civilization series at the start of this article. That's because at heart it's a 4X game (Explore, Expand, Exploit, Exterminate), and the characters seem to borrow the cartoonish look from Civ 6. Not even this side of the gameplay made me forgive its sins, because the diplomatic game is flat on its face. As long as you keep your relationships with the other bigwigs topped up by trading alcohol, weapons or money, they'll leave you in peace to grow your empire beyond any possibility of them ever standing up to you by forming alliances. That absolutely will not happen. And as for territorial wars with your rivals, the situation is simple: the moment war is declared you can conquer three or four bars, brothels, casinos or distilleries almost instantly, and the enemy will come running at you with a wad of cash so you'll leave them alone.

As long as you make sure to sink all your ill-gotten gains into security upgrades for every establishment you own, you become invulnerable to any attack.

Given that this game fails to impress on any front when it comes to gameplay, its only remaining hope is atmosphere and story. Each character has a personal questline you run through in the first 15 minutes, and I couldn't have cared less about any of it if I'd tried. That's it.

Empire of Sin doesn't sell me on the atmosphere of gangsters, jazz and outlawed alcohol one bit. All the characters are grotesque caricatures, sinister puppets your gran keeps up in the attic and that give you a proper fright every time she sends you up there to fetch a jar of pickles. And the establishments you own? They all look the same and don't change noticeably at all once you've upgraded them. What's more, during fights the customers in those places all stand motionless and cowering for the whole duration of the scrap… and if you need to pass through them, they'll literally slide out of your way like a curling stone. They could easily have included civilians as a neutral faction, and too many collateral casualties in the war for the right to hooch could have led to an increasingly hostile attitude from the local police. Police I always forget exist in the game, because I'm often brawling with Al Capone's men in the middle of the street while the coppers stroll right past us without paying us the slightest attention, and their raids come once in a blue moon and are quickly sorted out with a cheap bribe. Returning, though, to the game's atmosphere and the indestructibility of furniture: HOW CAN I

HAVE A BAR FIGHT WITHOUT BROKEN CHAIRS

ON MY BACK???? In every gangster film the bar gets shot to pieces, splinters and shards fly everywhere, and every table used for cover turns to sawdust. Here I can throw three grenades in the same spot and the floor doesn't even blacken.

I have nothing good to say about Empire of Sin: it's a hotchpotch of mechanics and styles nicked from other games, with a cheap art deco sticker slapped over the top to evoke the Prohibition era. Both peel off easily. After playing for more hours than it deserved, I was left with the impression that it's still an early access game and could still be improved.

But this is a 'finished' game that costs 40 euros… money I reckon you'd be better off putting into Silent Storm and its Sentinels expansion pack (a 2003 game that outclasses Empire of Sin on every front, animations and graphics included). Silent Storm even has a fully destructible environment (I demolished the entire facade of a two-storey house with a Lewis gun). Empire of Sin is the first turn-based tactical game I've ever considered a complete waste of time. It had potential by the cartload and chose the path of sub-mediocrity.

What a shame.