Empire of Sin

Bought the season pass? Waiting for the second expansion? What do you mean, check the developer website and you can clearly see that they no longer even acknowledge that they developed this game, so why should they be expected to be working on a second expansion? First and last Romero Games product I will ever buy. Game was fun enough, but if developer (who claims to be community focused) can't deliver on products it has already committed to release (by selling a season pass to the community promising two expansions and only delivering one), I find myself having no faith in the company or those behind it. Note, this isn't a case of the developer going under and not being a company that can deliver anymore. This is a case of a developer washing their hands of their product and then announcing they are working on a new product....after taking (and still willing to take - since you can still buy the premium bundle with the 2 expansion season pass) customer money for a product they never plan to deliver. Shameful. The type of developer that no gamer should support on principle. Update: I reported the premium edition and second expansion still being on sale to Steam despite the dev not delivering and nothing has come of it in about 6 months. Thank you Steam for protecting your customers.

I bought the expansion pass and they didnt release the 2nd expansion. needs a lawsuit

It is really sad because i have been waiting for a game like this my entire life. The game is pretty nice and had the feels of a criminal organization builder. A lot of shaky features and glitches they fixed in first expansion. BUUUUUUTT, be warned. DO NOT BUY EXPANSION PASS! The devs have abandoned this game and run off with our money for expansion. if you buy this game you are buying an incomplete game. There was alot for them to fix to make this game perfect and they decided we are not worth it nor will they face any concequenses(so at least they think) i say this game is worth it on sale for $10, 20 if you dont have anything better to spend your money on like expired milk. would of gave them a thumbs up but i'm sure they understand the thumbs down

so after years without an update, you drop a £12 dlc...and wipe every bodies saves... and no mention of the update that does it...or what the update was??? other than a save wipe... STAY AWAY FROM THIS GAME.

Fun game and i enjoy it, basic resource management mixed with turn based combat like xcom. I cant recommend the game tho because the developers abandoned the game and left a lot of people high and dry. Also didn't fix much needed bugs and stuff. If you can get it for free then why not but i wouldn't give these people any money.

Broken, rugpull game. Tons of bugs that will ruin the game for you and stop a campaign in its tracks. Expansion 2 was sold but never delivered. I actually liked the game, thought it could be a little slow at times, but thought it had potential. Sadly now it is abandoned.

I know, I have 300+ hours on a game I don't recommend. It's cause I'm a sucker for steam achievements. PROS: - I like the combat itself. I think I may just like tactical RPGs, though, since I haven't played a lot of them. - The period details are nice, they definitely did their research on the storefronts, weapons, etc (not so much on the factions, as half of them are fictional). - The equipment system is very RPG-like and works well. - The boss fights are satisfying, fun, and challenging. CONS: oh boy, I've thought about these for a while. Essentially, Empire of Sin doesn't know what it wants to be. - It seems to be leaning towards a tactical RPG since that's what the combat is, but once you play you realize you have to employ 4X tactics to actually win. Maybe 4X is a bit inaccurate, since you can't really "expand" peacefully; somebody has to die, but when it's thug rackets that don't pose any actual danger to you it might as well be. The problem with this isn't that it's mixing genres, but combining lots of combat with how granular squad-based combat is makes the game extremely tedious. You're going to be taking over about 30 or so thug rackets, none of them are going to be remotely challenging, and it's going to be boring once you've seen the handful of building designs they have for each size racket, if not before. - The 4X nature of the gameplay gets worse when you realize there's only one way to win: the equivalent of a domination victory. Even the original Civilization in '91 let you win the space race if you didn't want to nuke everyone. Sure, you can buy factions out if you're protecting them, but this leads to a lot of thumb-twiddling while you save up the cash and have to do dumb stuff to get them to like you. You also won't be considered enough of a threat to get protection from until you've killed at least three bosses in vanilla (I only had to kill one when I played with Make It Count). - So in other words, you are going to be fighting a lot of barbarians (thugs) and other factions. And it's going to get boring. Really boring, really fast. I get that any kind of strategy game is going to have a degree of repetition when you've got multiple factions to play as, and that's not necessarily an issue. But in Empire of Sin there's really no reason I should be fighting this many battles where no one is taking damage, it's just a waste of time. I believe they foresaw this and added the "auto-battle" feature, which would be nice if it didn't massively underrate how likely you are to win a fight and required saving before/after to avoid a game over. - The game plays out almost exactly the same every time. Sure, the bosses have different abilities that are mostly pointless (we'll get to that later), but what you're doing is the same every time. You're killing a few bosses (or all of them), you're buying the Golden Tommy Gun, you're hiring Norah Quinn because you have to have a doctor, etc. Nothing changes but the layout of the neighborhoods, which may be of minor tactical importance but is ultimately nbd. Let's look at some other strategy games: In Civilization and EU4 (New World), you can randomize the map so resources and strategic points are different every time. You can't do this in Crusader Kings, but the game world is so vast that playing in sub-Saharan Africa is completely different from playing in the Mediterranean which is completely different from playing in Siberia. There's also different eras you can start in. Something like this is BADLY needed to preserve replay value. - The side quests are way, way, way too easy. Talk to your crew member, kill a guy in a completely pointless, one-sided battle (sometimes you don't even have to do this), collect a few thousand bucks. Probably takes less than five minutes even if you read all the dialogue. The only ones that are a little better are the boss quest lines, which are both more challenging and more interesting story-wise, but there's still maybe on the level of a randomly generated Skyrim fetch-quest. - There are probably dozens of mechanics that just do. not. matter. at. all. I almost feel bad saying this because I'm sure some poor Irishmxn or two probably spent months coding these but here's a short list: honor, hunkering down, brothels, BOP raids, Chicago PD raids, alcohol storage, morale, loyalty, gangster roles, neighborhood lieutenants, the gangster rating system, any of the gangsters that cost more than $3-4K to hire (about half), gangsters hating/loving each other, the "worried" status effect, and temporary business arrangements. A lot of these things feel sophisticated until you realize they don't matter at all; it almost feels like the team that came up with them had a different vision entirely and thought this was more of a sandbox strategy than what it was. Conclusion: not worth it in its current state. There's definitely some solid potential here, and I think a fun sequel could be made if they ditched all the higher-level strategy (neighborhoods, weekly income, rackets, precincts) focused on boss fights and actually doing something challenging in the quests, but I think you'd also have to ditch the whole multiple playable factions thing. Make it more like GTA or Mafia but a tactical RPG, and make it absolutely nothing like Civ.

[b]Edit: A quick note, I intend to play this game again at some point and adjust my review once I've done that. I know since I wrote this review another developer did step in and finished off the promised DLC. I've not checked out the changes myself yet, but going by the discussion for this game things have improved so I feel it's only fair I give it another chance.[/b] Do not buy this game, it's a serious rip off, especially don't pay for the second DLC, it doesn't exist, and never will. This game is a complete rip off, and the developer, publisher, and even steam should be ashamed of the way they are still selling this product with a 2nd DLC that the publisher has already stated will never be delivered as the game has been "archived". For those, like myself, that pre-order this game having already paid for that second DLC. which as I just said they have no plans to ever deliver. They took money from people and never delivered the product that was paid for. The game itself isn't terrible, but yet at the same time isn't great either. Positives: - The visuals are nice. - The sound is good. - Combat is okay, fun at first. - Skills/Upgrades - it has a reasonable list of skills you can learn as each member of the team levels up. I won't go into detail, but some are useful, others not so useful. Negatives: - Combat - as I said it's okay, but it quickly becomes repetitive - AI regularly makes very poor decisions during combat. - - At the start of combat, they won't enter via the door you actually clicked on, they'll be randomly placed inside the building. Randomness in a game like this isn't necessarily a bad thing, but to me being essentially teleported to the opposite side of the building is a bit jarring. To me there are better ways to create randomess to this type of game. It also kills any real ability to try different strategies/tactics in combat, since you're just randomly placed, you can't choose how you want to approach combat. - - As combat triggers, they'll scatter, but the places they choose to take cover in often make no sense as they provide cover in the wrong direction, and leave themselves completely exposed in the direction fire will actually be coming from. - Businesses (legal/illegal) - too limited, not enough variety. - The city/map felt like a bunch of disconnected towns rather than one large city. - It HAD potential - however as noted above this game will never reach its true potential, it's been abandoned. - Dialogue is terribly cheesy, and the same lines a repeated over and over again. Not sure if it was bad writing or bad acting, I suspect a combo of both. As an example, you can fully upgrade one of your own businesses, and still, when you walk in with your chosen boss they'll regularly say "What's this dump?".... it's one of your own businesses you idiot, or worse, it's your home/safe house you dumbo. - What is there is good, but ultimately it lacks content and would need a few large DLC updates to be a worthwhile game. Would I recommend this game to others... NO, NO WAY! Paradox and Romero should be embarrassed to have released this game in the state that it was in. They should be ashamed of themselves for taking people's money and then running away without delivering what was promised, and yes, it was officially stated two DLC would be delivered. Avoid Romero games at all costs, a game about criminals, and in my opinion, made by a bunch of criminals. Will not be buying a game by Romero ever again.