There are personal quests, story quests, and ambient quests, often filling up the space between the strategy meta-game. Crew members will refuse to target friends and loved ones if you happen to end up fighting them, they’ll fall in and out of love and get jealous, they’ll sometimes rebel if you don’t promote them enough. The ambient character interactions are great, too.
The more difficult fights are also incredibly engaging, especially when the unique traits of your recruited mobsters start popping off in unexpected ways. The voice acting, ambience, moody streets, writing, and the soundtrack are all phenomenal. This all stings like salt in a switchblade slash, because when Empire of Sin works, it really does feel like it has the makings of a classic.
There’s no way to speed up time, either, leading to periods of thumb twiddling, baseball bat polishing nothingness. Being able to pause and warp around instantly to anywhere on the map also makes ambushing foes far too easy, and makes upgrading racket defence feel a little pointless. The lack of a Total War style combat auto-resolve – a fairly standard strategy feature for strategy hybrids such as this – means a lot of time is spent fighting simple, grindy battles when you’re mopping up after a war with a rival gang. There’s a few real issues that feel like very deliberate design decisions, too. Throw lost progress from corrupted autosaves, crashes, and animation quirks into the brew, and I was thinking of going teetotal. One quest shut down all my breweries for a month for narrative reasons, but then wouldn’t let me open them again once I’d finished, effectively crashing my economy. Enemy factions are too passive, not expanding aggressively, or even making use of many of the game’s (admirably extensive) diplomacy features. Rivals frequently make stupid combat descisions, so a lot of fights effectively play themselves, while the nemesis-style character interactions the game is capable of occur rarely and sporadically. I’ve spent around 17 hours with the game on standard difficulty, and during that time, some incredible highlights have been dulled by a nagging feeling that things aren’t quite working as intended. I just can’t help feeling Romero Games have poured out a glass of hooch before it’s fully fermented. Part Crusader Kings grand strategy, part XCOM, part RPG, no-one could accuse this Prohibition-era empire sim of not stacking the chips high when it comes to creativity, raw ambition, and a real love for systemic gameplay. Technically speaking, Empire of Sin is currently a bit of a mess, but like a chalk outline in a cordoned-off crime scene, it’s the sort of mess that’s very difficult to tear yourself away from.
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