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 one of those things because the charm lies in Empire of Sin being all of those things.
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.
