This game had potential. Somebody on the development team clearly understood the ambience of 1920s and ’30s gangland crime. On the street level, the world looks the part. The ambience is strong, the atmosphere convincing. Whoever designed those graphics got it right — the lighting, the detail, the smoky vibe of prohibition Chicago. It works. But the moment you pull back to the world map, it all falls apart. The scale is hideous, the colour palette drains to a Unity-style grayscale mess, and the transition is clunky. It doesn’t feel like surveying an empire; it feels like being tilted back into a dentist’s chair. And for a game about running a crime empire, that sense of control and immersion should never be broken.

But graphics are not the real problem here. The real problem is that whoever designed the gameplay had absolutely no idea what it means to play as a mob boss. What we’ve ended up with is not a mafia game at all, but XCOM in a pinstripe suit. And while I don’t mind a bit of grind at the start — running street-level gunfights to establish your crew is fine as an opening act — once you become the boss, you should stop pulling the triggers yourself. Carlo Gambino didn’t personally storm warehouses with a Tommy gun every time he wanted to expand territory. The essence of being a mob boss is distance: you give the orders, your people carry them out, and you deal with the consequences. Violence, when it happens, is rare and deliberate — it’s about pressure, extortion, and fear. Empire of Sin misses that completely.

That’s why, even nearly thirty years later, Gangsters: Organized Crime remains unbeaten. That game understood what it meant to be the boss. You handed out orders for the week, sent your men to do their work, and then sat back to see how it played out. If someone resisted, you reacted. If someone crossed you, you escalated. You weren’t down in the alleys throwing punches — you were above it all, pulling strings. Empire of Sin doesn’t even attempt that. It throws you into endless turn-based firefights as though you’re just another hood, and the whole fantasy of being the one in charge evaporates.

And here’s the rub: even if you do accept the idea of “XCOM in pinstripes,” Empire of Sin still fails, because it’s a bad XCOM clone. The tactical combat is clunky, repetitive, and boring. If I send twelve men to storm a racket, I shouldn’t have to micromanage every single one of them through a turn-based trudge. That’s not strategy, that’s busywork. Worse still, the AI is dreadful. Your crew charges into a fight like headless chickens, bunching up in the middle of the room so the enemy can lob grenades into a perfect huddle. Not only does it break immersion, it makes every battle feel like the same tedious grind. The order of turns is random, the pacing is sluggish, and after a few encounters, the whole system collapses into boredom. And that’s the major problem: if your core mechanic is combat, and your combat is poor, then the game is poor. Even judged purely as an XCOM knockoff, it’s not good.

Even when you try to act like a strategist, the interface won’t let you. For example, you can “upgrade” security on rackets, but you can’t do the most basic thing imaginable: post men on chokepoints. I controlled a whole precinct with only two ways in. Any real boss would have hoods on those corners day and night, making sure rivals couldn’t sneak in unnoticed. In Gangsters: Organized Crime, the moment one of your men spotted an enemy hood, you got word back, and you decided whether to intercept, tail, or ignore them. Here? Nothing. Other gangs wander into your territory with impunity. The police are equally useless. I’ve had full-scale shootouts in the street while patrolmen strolled by without batting an eye. In Gangsters: Organized Crime, if you started a fight in front of the police, squad cars would come screaming out of nowhere and you’d be lucky to make it out alive. And God forbid you tried anything near City Hall — you might as well have signed your own death warrant. Here, the police don’t matter. They’re props. And that is idiotic.

What made Gangsters: Organized Crime so good, beyond the mechanics, was the interaction with the community. You weren’t just running rackets; you were running a city. You dealt with the public, the newspapers, the churches, the politicians. You felt like you were weaving yourself into the fabric of the neighbourhood, building influence and respect as much as fear. Every decision rippled outward into the community you claimed to control. In Empire of Sin, there is no community. There are just numbers on a screen. No sense of ownership, no sense of belonging, no sense of consequence. You’re not running a family, you’re ticking boxes in a spreadsheet.

The sit-downs could have saved it, but they don’t. On paper, the idea of negotiating truces, forming alliances, and carving up the city is great. In practice, it’s shambolic. You agree to a truce, and thirty seconds later the AI breaks it because the hidden algorithm flipped from “friendly” to “hostile” on some invisible curve. It doesn’t feel like strategy; it feels like coin-toss diplomacy. The result is that deals carry no weight, no permanence. There’s no tension, no fear, no satisfaction in the betrayal — just frustration that the system is broken.

And then there’s the soundtrack. It’s wonderfully put together, full of smoky swing and prohibition flavour. But it feels strangely pointless, because so much of the real music of that era is already in the public domain. They could have dropped in actual recordings from Duke Ellington, Bessie Smith, or Jelly Roll Morton and made every speakeasy feel authentic. Instead, we get imitations. Competent, yes. Atmospheric, yes. But never quite real. The chance to elevate the game into something genuinely cinematic was missed.

What really twists the knife is that the blueprint already exists. Gangsters: Organized Crime came out in 1998, and people still talk about it as the best mob game ever made. Why? Because it understood the fundamentals. You weren’t just running rackets, you were running a city. You dealt with the churches, the newspapers, City Hall. You bribed police chiefs, judges, attorneys — you lived in the community you controlled. One Steam user summed it up perfectly when talking about Empire of Sin: “With SO MANY different games to take inspiration from… yet you ignore 90% of the cool things that happen… bribing police chiefs, judges, attorneys… all of the depth of a realistic game have been removed.”

And the difference goes deeper. In Gangsters, you gave orders to your crew and watched the week play out, dealing with consequences like a true boss. You didn’t babysit every hood with turn-based dice rolls. You felt powerful because you were above the action. In Empire of Sin, you’re down there in the muck, micromanaging twelve idiots bunched together waiting for a grenade. Even if you accept it as “XCOM in pinstripes,” it fails — because the combat is clunky, repetitive, and boring. As another fan put it: “Gangsters is still the godfather of the genre. Nothing since has even come close — not Omerta, not Empire of Sin, not anything.”

So here’s the comparison from a mob boss’s perspective: In Gangsters: Organized Crime, I was the Don. I gave orders, built influence, kept the cops and press onside, and controlled a living community. I was feared because my men carried out my will, and I was respected because the city bent to it. In Empire of Sin, I’m a babysitter with a Tommy gun, stuck in endless firefights that make me feel more like a hired thug than a boss. There’s no community, no consequence, no depth — just repetition and grind.

That’s why Gangsters is still remembered, and Empire of Sin will be forgotten. One game understood what it meant to be the mob. The other confused it with a bad XCOM clone.

So, I played this game years ago and enjoyed it. Bought it again even though I saw all the bad reviews. After a few months of not playing, I guess the game decided to erase my save file. I do NOT recommend this game.

Game is alright, it is rather enjoyable for the first 10 - 20 hours of game play but gets rather boring after you get high level associates and main character.
The development of your precincts are quite lacklustre and just boils down the money maxing, I never had police attention even once.
Get game on sale if you really want it, but this game seems semi abandoned and isn't worth anyone's time.