City of Gangsters is a gritty, jazzy and somewhat ambitious Economy management sim. Will your bootlegging crime syndicate reach the empire heights you wish? Or will you crumble?

I originally got a taste of City of Gangsters around 6 months ago and was somewhat critical of the game. There was an interesting baseline at the time, but I felt the game was lacking depth in a lot of areas. I praised the fact it had seemingly limitless replayability and variability with map seeds, whilst lamenting the unnecessarily plodding early game pace.

So, six months on, how has the game been improved upon and have my gripes with the preview build been addressed and fixed? For the most part, yes. The game is in a significantly more enjoyable spot than it was and appears to have really ironed out some of the kinks.

So, let’s look into it a little deeper. Firstly, let’s look at the map seed aspect that I was excited about, but hadn’t previously gotten to experience. The game has 3 maps, a randomiser for the map value and 16 different nationalities to choose from for your character. On top of that you can change your character’s name, gender (only male and female here) and from a list of 9 different starting skills, all of which are pretty handy. The sheer number of possible variations here makes it physically impossible for anyone to ever fully live out, every variation, of the game from start to finish. I personally love this and wish more games of this nature had this level of variability. It’s something that games like Minecraft have thrived using with seed generation and is easily something I’d love to see more of.

The tutorial is a little bit hit and miss I found, it was a welcome addition, because I found myself floundering a little previously without a real direction of what to do. The tutorial consists of a lot of spotlighting text boxes and the occasional action to proceed. It also uses the “this exists, but we’ll look at that later” idea a little too much for my liking. It was a little bit disjointed, and I felt could flow a bit better by letting you do more of what it was saying, without forcing you to go down a checklist of options for each section. However, this may only be because I had a fundamental understanding of the game already from having fooled around with it a fair bit previously.

The pacing of the game is significantly improved, and I definitely didn’t feel like I was struggling to find places to buy and sell to, particularly my homemade bootleg alcohol. Whilst the amount shops buy starts high and takes a long time to pick up again. There was a significant amount more places I found, and the amounts they were willing to buy was significantly higher much quicker than it had been in my original attempt at the game. Problematically, I found myself getting overwhelmed really quickly. Whereas the first time I played, I found myself with little to do. This time, every single person I spoke to after a certain point had missions for me to do. It felt like everywhere I went, someone needed money, or free goods, or wanted me to start making some other kind of alcohol.

It was very overwhelming, very quickly. On top of having to deal with police presence flying around, forgetting which of my crew had the money in their car, or the goods to sell, or a combination of both, I found myself getting lost really quickly. The first twenty to thirty of this game are a deep learning experience, and the first few attempts you make are going to be difficult to get solid continuous progress. Thankfully it didn’t seem like there was time limits on the missions everyone was giving me, but my mission list became huge so quickly I couldn’t keep up at all. With more play, and a better understanding of the systems of the game this surely becomes quite manageable, but you’re looking at upwards of thirty hours to get to that point of comfort.

The part that I found myself having the biggest gripe with, was the background music. At first, the rhythmic jazz is relaxing and charming. But after hearing the same bass and drum beat for ten hours straight, I was beginning to fray a little. The game could benefit from an investment in a small soundtrack of sorts. Keep it jazz, that’s perfectly fine and fitting of the aesthetic. But having a variety would be fantastic. I can only listen to the same thing for so long before it begins to grate on my ears like nails down a chalkboard. It’s a nice song, but it’s not nice for the extended periods of time I was playing the game.

If you were taking it in shorter bursts. Playing 45 minutes to an hour here or there, I don’t see this being an issue. But because of the way the game works, you’re going to easily be sinking three to four plus hours into the game at a time, just to feel like you’re making progress.

The mechanics of the game seemed to be working far better than they had previously. Selling goods to people earned me favours. Favours which I turned in to find others buying my goods or selling me product I would need for my goods. They also gave me a leg up and some early relationship with these people. Strong-arming businesses into paying me protection money seemed far less obnoxious, and people who liked me, were HAPPY to help me out. Whereas people who didn’t, would let me know how they felt, but didn’t instantly tank my relationship with them to the pits.

I felt that using the favours to get relationship positives with other people, wasn’t as effective as I would like, but perhaps choosing people with a better relationship with that person overall would help more. Expanding your territory feels somewhat slow and requires a bit of early investment to get going, but quickly increases your sway and power. Problematically, if I had extorted a business into paying me protection, and then made them one of my business partners, they would still have to pay me their protection money, but it would take that expense into their monthly cut. So, I would theoretically make nothing off that business, until I opted to stop extorting them.

It seems like maybe something that should automatically take place. I see no reason I’d be demanding protection money, from my own front/business partner, but perhaps it was something I was missing in understanding.

City of Gangsters is in a far better place than it was 6 months ago, and the developer has been hard at work with continuous updates to improve the longevity of the game. There is a serious passion here, and whilst the game is lacking in some areas, there is an amazing amount of good too. If you’re looking at something a bit more methodical, with a huge amount of replayability that you can easily put a couple hours into it, here and there. Then City of Gangsters is definitely one to consider.