Empire of Sin review
Empire of Sin is one of the newest games I’ve reviewed so far, and unfortunately I can’t review much of it for reasons I’ll get too; but for now I’ll say that this review is going to be a brief one. The game comes to us from Romero Games, a company founded by husband-and-wife John and Brenda Romero; John Romero of course being famous for his work at id Software alongside John Carmack, who together evolved the first-person-shooter genre throughout the 90s, starting with the lesser known Hovertank 3D, then to Catacomb 3D, and then the renowned triumvirate of Wolfenstein 3D to Doom and finally to Quake. After Quake the duo fell apart leading John Carmack to remain at id Software to create the progenitor of the bland, brown, military shooter in the form of Quake II, a game completely unrelated to Quake I; and John Romero left to claim the top bunk with the disastrous Daikatana. After the split of the two Johns, it seems that the responsibility of advancing the technology of first-person-shooters fell to Valve, who released Half-Life in 1998 and soon enough followed that up with a sequel in Half-... Wait a minute, sorry; I’m supposed to be reviewing Empire of Sin.
Empire of Sin is a top-down tactical strategy game, a genre which now-a-days is called an “XCOM-style game”, with a huge and overwhelming business management aspect. You play as one of 14 real life prohibition-era gangsters, although I imagine most people, like me, will choose to play as Al Capone because he’s the only one that they’ve heard of. Once you’ve chosen Al Capone, you find yourself in a taxi; you’ve recently left New York City to seek your fortune in Chicago and rise to the top of a criminal empire; an Empire that is based on sin, if you will. Your taxi driver is actually one of first contacts in the criminal world as it happens because he offers to put you into contact with one of the local bosses that Al Capone’s already familiar with from back in New York, in return for a favour. I never got around to doing this favour, but for now, the taxi driver acts as your guide for the tutorial.
Now, the first piece of real criticism I can lobby at this game is the tutorial. You get talked at for so long regarding a huge number of game mechanics scattered through about 20 different pages of menus and lists. This game really should have paced its tutorial. Have everything available at the start sure, but only tutorialize it once it becomes necessary, usually with a number of tutorial missions. I’m pretty sure that’s how XCOM handled its player training, and Age of Empires II had a seven mission tutorial campaign for players to go through slowly over a couple of hours. Empire of Sin doesn’t do that it keeps talking and talking often about things that you don’t even need yet.
Once Al Capone has arrived he marches straight into someone racket and single-handedly guns down a number of thugs within, taking over the racket for himself. This attracts a small number of local gangsters who decide to be hired by you for no real reason, before you decide to take another nearby racket in the form of a brewery. The combat in this game is fine, some of the starting weapons do feel a little weak and underpowered, especially Al Capone’s own revolver, but I won’t hold that against the game, because you can probably upgrade your weapons and skill over the course of the game; I personally never got around to doing much of this unfortunately, partially because the tutorials were unclear about how to do it, and partially for reasons I’ll come back to soon.
After taking over two rackets (rackets by the way is a gangster term referring to any building owned by a mob-boss for his illicit activities, be it alcohol, gambling, brewing, or prostitution) you’re invited to a sit down with the Boss that you took them from. This was first boss fight, and as the game points out, that’s “boss fight” in the quite literal sense. How clever. Anyway, once you kill the boss, whose name I can’t remember, you officially take over all of his rackets, which I think included the safehouse you were currently fighting in, and that’s it. Now you have the humble beginnings of your criminal empire. After this the plot is... ummm. Well that was unclear. You’re given the objective of building up your empire by holding five rackets. Once I was done with that, I managed to find my objectives screen and found I had about five different quests already in progress, only one of which I actually knew how I came across. While wondering the streets I was often encountered by a roaming pack of gangsters from another family who threatened me and asked me what I was doing in their neighbourhood. I would usually retaliate with a threat of my own, but nothing ever came of it for some reason, so I’m not sure what was going on there.
Well, whatever, I said this review was going to be brief so let me tell about why I stopped playing. The game wasn’t too buggy, despite a number of reviews I’d seen saying it was. Maybe the bugs would have started manifesting if I had played more than 2 hours of it, but the reason I only played two hours of it is this: I had decided to forgo the quests and just build up the number of rackets I had for while by attacking random abandoned buildings occupied by general family-less thugs. I figured that doing this would give me a bit of experience, and let me play around with the mechanics for a while letting me figure them all out as I went. After doing this for a short while, I found myself being told by an underling that there were some shifty characters causing trouble in one of my bars, and was asked to come round and deal them personally. I decided to take this as my first proper quest so I headed over to the bar. I entered the bar, approached the bartender who had called me over, and then my laptop froze. Not the game, my entire laptop. I couldn’t control-escape out of the game even ctrl-alt-del my way out, forcing me perform an emergency shutdown.
Now I don’t have the most powerful of laptops, but it can still handle some highly processor intensive games. I’ve ran XCOM, Subnautica, and Black Mesa; and they’ve all ran fine without breaking anything. It may have been a coincidence, but I far as I can see it, Empire of Sin broke my laptop forcing me to perform an emergency shutdown, just to get control back. After that happened, I decided to call it quits. That wasn’t particularly grabbing me, but I was trying to give it a chance and see it though for at least a few more hours, but if a game is going to crash my computer, I don’t want anything to do with it. I definitely checked the minimum hardware requirements for the game, before I bought it and I should have been able to run it fine.
So that was Empire of Sin, a game so good that my laptop buckled under the pressure of having to run such a titanic marvel.
Comments
Post a Comment