Empire of Sin is rightfully getting some buzz. You’ve probably already heard this is the game Brenda Romero “always wanted to make”, who’s said she’s been biding her time on the idea “for 20 years”. The result of Brenda’s long-standing love of mobster games, XCOM, and Civilization, Empire of Sin’s drawn comparisons with some of publisher Paradox Interactive’s biggest names, as well as those big hitters of the entire genre, too.
On the surface, that’s exactly what it looks like: Civ on top, as you manage resources and tiles, and XCOM when you get up close. But the sense I got from seeing it in action – hands off, mind – was that if we’re going to be name-dropping any other big, strategic PC franchise, it should really be Total War.
You’ll start out having to choose a faction, with a certain character as the faction leader, as well as the actual scale of mob feud you’re after. This means choosing how many neighborhoods and rival bosses you want to face off against. My demo actually had a great, seemingly organic “woah” moment where we zoomed out from street view to an overview of the entire district, which I thought was the whole game, until we zoomed out to level of abstraction to view the whole city, with multiple, detached districts of 1920s Chicago in sight (three playable in my case, but with more possible).
There’s a decent scale to Empire of Sin then, but what struck me was a seemingly vast depth. Take the characters themselves, for instance. Your task in the game is to gain control of the city with your faction, starting small and new to the town, and growing into an empire of you-know-what, and so at first you’ll have just a couple of characters in your gang. You’ll meet more along the way, each one with a specific set of traits, as well as some history with other characters. As they progress through the game those relationships will evolve, according to what you have them do: have one character perform certain bloody tasks and they’ll get a thirst (and aptitude) for it. Keep doing that and they’ll eventually pick up the “serial killer” trait, though, and they’ll get a little unpredictable. Send them somewhere with another of your faction members and, if they get into an argument, that other characters will probably wind up dead. Overlook another character for a promotion within your gang and they might get antsy. Send a goon to kill a lover of theirs in another gang and they might refuse to do it – or if their lover’s killed by someone else, they might go wild. In other words, these characters provide the human element that should keep games surprising.