Strategy Gaming Online - Reviews : Gangsters: Organized Crime

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REVIEWS

box.jpg (6560 bytes) Gangsters: Organized Crime

DEVELOPER : Hot House Creations
PUBLISHER : Eidos

Requirements:
Pen. 133MHz, 16 MB of RAM

Recommend:
Pen. 166MHz, 48 MB of RAM

Face it, America has this strange fascination with what we call the Mafia. The betrayals, scandals, the murders and executions, the family. But all that comes from one driving interest, making money by whatever means necessary. So, strip away all the drama and what have you got left? Nothing more than a business. Hot House Creations has teamed up with Eidos to create their freshman debut with Gangsters: Organized Crime. Essentially a business sim, with a twist. You run your own family, making money through extortion, bribery and flat out murder. This is carried out within the game through two distinct modes: turn-based and real-time. How well do the two modes mesh? Read on.

You begin the game in the turn-based mode. Here you have access to the overview of your business. Each turn represents one week. Within that time frame, you will issue orders to your thugs. Orders include purchasing a legal business (to help hide illegal cash), setting up an illegal business (whorehouses, prizefights, casinos, stilleries, speakeasies and a host of others), extorting from the local establishments, assaulting uncooperative citizens, bribing police, ambushing rival families, firebombing business’ and more. Each task usually depends on the strength of one or two specific skills. Each thug in your family has a varying amount of levels on each skill represented by stars. Assigning the right thugs to do the job is essential. You can equip them with guns (to battle rival crime families) and vehicles (to get around town better). A word to the wary: equipping your hoods with guns will make them use them and usually gets them in hot water with the police (who shoot first and ask questions later). You than set up your crime family into teams. You are allowed to promote up to ten lieutenants. Within each lieutenants team you will have a maximum of ten members. Each team should be set up around what function you wish them to do. One team should be the recruiting team who will spend each week recruiting new members to the family (you can never have enough hoods at your disposal, especially when a gang war breaks out). Other teams will include the extorting team (to muscle the local business’), the collection team (to collect ‘protection’ money from successfully extorted business’), patrolling teams (to keep an eye on the neighborhood and watch for rival family members), etc.

When orders have been given out, the workweek begins. Here starts the real-time mode. The map changes to street level where you watch your hoods move out and attempt to succeed at their orders. Message alerts will warn you of rival gang members in your territory, of gunfights and failed orders. At any time you may take control of gang members and issue orders. These include to assault or kill someone on the streets. Most weeks will be quiet, so thankfully there is an option to speed up the week. Should a message pop up, the game immediately slows time back to the slowest setting. This part of the game happens to be a bit intrusive to the playing experience since there seems to be no real strategy part in this mode. If your hood shoots another hood, the police come out in force. Your hood fires back. If you get there and order him to flee, half the time his route seems to be straight PAST the police, causing him to get shot. This portion of the game is where the problems crop up in an otherwise enjoyable gaming experience. Your hoods seem to have their heads stuck way up their ass, you constantly have to keep them out of trouble. If and when a shootout occurs, the police come out in force (it’s tough to get away). When they do come out, your hood, if equipped with a gun, fires back until you tell him to flee. There is no option to have him surrender. Usually the police end up gunning him down. Thankfully, though each hood has there own name and face to distinguish them from the rest, you never get attached to one and can easily replace them.

After spending a few weeks marking out your territory through extortion and collection teams, and having recruited enough hoods, it’s time to shift gears. To build up your empire you need more cash. There is only so much of the city you may extort before hitting a rival gangs turf. In the mid game you have not the resources to successfully pull off a turf war. It is better to continue to build in your own territory. You will do this by purchasing legal business’ to act as fronts for illegal ones. An attempt should be made to have the illegal business mirror the legal; or else the FBI becomes suspicious. In one game I watched a rival gang get wiped out because their leader was arrested by the FBI and eventually sentenced to prison. Not exactly the way to go. Its best to purchase a restaurant in order to hide that speakeasy as opposed to a casino being operated behind a deli.

During this time you will use two key business weapons. No, not a Tommy Gun, I’m talking about your Accountant and your Lawyer. Your Accountant will be able to hide more of your illegal funds than you could on your own. He will also be able to help you in determining if one of your hoods is pocketing a little extra cash for himself (and if this is the case, you have the option of killing him to teach the others a lesson). He can also fudge the taxes, if you feel you’re paying Uncle Sam too much as it is. Your Lawyer can help keep the FBI off your back as well as help get your hoods off the wanted list and out of jail. Of course a bribe in the right hands can’t hurt.

After you’ve got the cash, it’s time to purchase the expensive weaponry in order to go after the rival gangs. There are three ways to win the campaign game. Wipe out the competition is viewed as the hardest and most desirable. If you have enough funds, your lawyer can help you run for mayor of the city. Than there is the easiest, which is to go legit. Simply wipe out all illegal businesses and activities and spend a turn making money from legal means. The choice is yours.

The choice of orders lends well to the game. Going legit is the easiest win. Becoming mayor seems very difficult as opposed to wiping out the other gangs, which becomes drawn out and a tad bit boring. Gangsters has two problems. The second one is that after the beginning of the game (the initial build up) and the mid game (establishing legal/illegal business’), you are left with the end game. The end game becomes the longest and as anyone knows, long drawn out end games are boring. When you spend your time doing nothing new from turn to turn the game becomes less of a game and MORE like a business. Boring, boring, boring. There is nothing left to do but search out your enemies and kill them off. This takes more time than anything else in the game; you spend it in the RTS mode, which, as I’ve said before, is the major problem within the game.

The first problem with Gangsters is interface. When you have one interface trying to operate for two modes of play, it just doesn’t work. You have to repeatedly click options open and close. Menu tabs are strewn about the main window to quickly give you information, but you are left in a routine of constantly clicking open and close. Instead of the interface changing from a turn-based model to an RTS one, it remains the same. In each mode, you basically wish half the buttons did one thing, while in the other mode you wish them to do the opposite.

Aesthetically, the graphics look good (thankfully there are three resolutions to choose from). They depict the twenties era with its brick buildings, old cars and fedora wearing hoods. People walk around, cars move about their business and the police walk their beat. You can even watch your hoods carry out your orders. They will have a circle underneath them depicting the color of your team. When spotted, your enemies will have their color highlighted underneath them (so you can tell friend from foe from civilian). The impression in the real-time mode is that of a real, living, breathing city. Of course this becomes a problem when innocent bystanders are caught in the middle of a gang shootout.

The music can be either fitting or completely unrelated to the genre and time period (depending on the track your on). Unfortunately, they picked this up-tempo; almost club beat, which really takes away from the 1920’s era they are trying to create. Something along the lines of big band jazz music would have been welcomer.

Though the two modes of play work well with each other, there just is not enough to do in the real time mode to warrant its inclusion. It’s within the turn-based mode that Gangsters really shines. Gangsters is, for the most part, unique. For those who learned how to speak Italian from watching the Godfather trilogy, here is your game. For those interested in business sims with a twist, this will catch your fancy (until the end game). All others steer clear.

Reviewed by A. Sage

Summary
Pros: Great turn-based gameplay. Unique genre Cons: Clumsy interface, lousy end game.
Interface : 5	Gameplay : 7	Graphics : 7
Audio : 6	Multiplayer : 7	Overall : 6.4