Empire of Sin – enjoying the many layers of an American gangster cake

I had the chance to play Brenda Romero’s new gangster game Empire of Sin for five hours the other day and learnt a number of things about it.

I learnt that it’s a game about moving up and down through layers. That’s why it’s hard to call Empire of Sin any one thing. Sometimes it looks like an RPG, sometimes it looks like XCOM, sometimes it looks like Civilization, and I’m sure at one point it even looked like Monopoly, the view zoomed so far out the buildings looked like plastic miniatures. But I can’t call it any of those things because the charm lies in Empire of Sin being of those things.

Empire of SinDeveloper: Romero GamesPublisher: ParadoxPlatform: Played on PCAvailability: Releases 1st December on PC, PS4, Xbox One and Switch, all for £35. Will be playable on PS5 and Xbox Series S/X.

It’s a game where at one moment you can be running your team around the streets, like you would in an RPG, ticking off quests in your journal, talking to characters, playing with character builds, swapping equipment out. And then in the next moment you can be up in the clouds looking down on the neighbourhood and mapping out your turf.

Then, you’re diving into the menus, managing what you’ve got. How many breweries do you have and what is their production like? Can you change the alcohol there? How alluring are your speakeasies, your brothels, your casinos and hotels? How well protected are they? There are pie charts, summaries of ins-and-outs, detailed breakdowns.