STEPHANIE ST. CLAIR EMPIRE OF SIN SERIES

I can get to know them in the way I would an RPG, even go on personalised loyalty quests for them, and promote them within my crime family if I like. Similarly, I can push relationships further with my team of gangsters. I can even watch the businesses change before my eyes as I pour money into them, improving the decor or bulking up the number of guards on duty there. I can walk into any one of my rackets and see them in action, people going about their business. In Civilization, I might think, 'Wouldn't it be cool to go inside these buildings and see what they're like, walk around and see what I own?' And in Empire of Sin, I can. I like this layer-hopping because it scratches an itch I get playing games with more rigid approaches. You will have chopped the head off the snake. Win and the HQ is yours, and the gang you're fighting will be no more. There's a turn order, action points, and running from cover to cover, trying to find a clear shot while not getting shot yourself. Negotiations broken, you're into XCOM turn-based combat, but still inside the HQ you were arguing in, now seeing it from a different view. How dare you knock off one of my rackets? How dare you talk to me like that? Fuck you! Yeah, well fuck you too! Bosses. You're either behind the desk, like Don Corleone in The Godfather, or sitting facing it like a naughty school child, camera switching between you as you make your dialogue decisions. Then, you're having a cinematic sitdown with another crime boss. 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. Then, you're diving into the menus, managing what you've got. And then in the next moment you can be up in the clouds looking down on the neighbourhood and mapping out your turf.

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.

STEPHANIE ST. CLAIR EMPIRE OF SIN SERIES

Will be playable on PS5 and Xbox Series S/X. Availability: Releases 1st December on PC, PS4, Xbox One and Switch, all for £35.But I can't call it any one of those things because the charm lies in Empire of Sin being all of those things. 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. That's why it's hard to call Empire of Sin any one thing. I learnt that it's a game about moving up and down through layers.

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.

Stephanie st. clair empire of sin