EMPIRE OF SIN

A new boss is in town to take over the forgotten gangster sim genre

- Robert Zak

NEED TO KNOW

RELEASE December 1, 2020

DEVELOPER Romero Games

PUBLISHER Paradox Interactive

LINK empireofsingame.com

I don’t know exactly what it was that caused five different gangs to go to war with me at once. Maybe envy, maybe my aggressive expansion into the wrong neighborhoods, or maybe the fact that I allowed the cops to use one of my speakeasies as a hangout in exchange for some leniency from the law.

The sudden surge of chaos felt like a real Paradox touch, where your seemingly stable empire can quickly fall into disarray due to a complex and clever web of systems underpinning AI behavior. Given that developer Romero Games brought on Paradox veteran Chris King as a designer for this glitzy Prohibition-era gangster sim, I should have expected no less.

But despite the onslaught that’s seeing my whiskey barrels and ladies of the night slip through my fingers into the ravenous maws of my rivals, I’m delighted. As a fan of the quintessential organized crime sim from the ’90s, Gangsters: Organized Crime, I’ve long been waiting for a worthy successor to step into its spats, and Empire of Sin could prove to be it.