Empire Of Sin
Developer Romero Games
Publisher Paradox Interactive
Format PC (tested), PS4, Switch, Xbox One
Release Out now
Here is probably the single best-known piece of gangster lore: it wasn’t the gunfights or bigticket crime sprees which proved the undoing of Al Capone, but getting busted for tax evasion. Not so for this Capone, though. In the version of 1920s mafioso history playing out in our game of Empire Of Sin, old Scarface was brought down by a particularly malicious poison. Capone was standing on the steps of a safehouse freshly wrenched from the fingers of Mabel Ryley, a rival mob boss. Or, more to the point, ex-rival. Before she joined that growing pile, though, Ryley got our man in the side with a poisoned blade. And so the first man to be named ‘Public Enemy Number One’ by the FBI just keeled over in the streets of Chicago, and met an end as anticlimactic as his real-life counterpart’s.
Every part of Empire Of Sin – and there are many – exists to facilitate stories like this. It’s easy to think of it as a genre-bending game, but the correct label to apply isn’t ‘strategy’ or ‘RPG’ or any of the other modes it flits between. It’s ‘crime fiction’. At its best, the game weaves tales that blend history, myth and Mario Puzo.