As they say in the Poem, “See the politicians, sittin’ by the kitchen, said he caught his fingers in the well he was wishin’ in.” City of Gangsters is set in the era of prohibition a little over 100 years ago. Because that’s what you need coming out of a two-year pandemic, less booze. You take on the legitimate business of trying to run gangland Chicago in City of Gangsters. Released far too long ago for me to only be getting this review out now, I think I need to get a move on with this one.

It is a management tycoon based on building up your business of running speakeasies, making hooch, and general racketeering while running out all the other immigrant families of Chicago. Oddly enough it is also turn-based, allowing you to get a number of things done without too much pressure. When I think of management/tycoon titles, I think of Theme hospital, Beach Life, Cities: Skylines, and many other more real-time business sims. Though doing the Lord’s turn-based work (often with a box knife) is relatively simple to get into, mastering it will take some time.

I talk about it every now and then in reviews/editorials, but I prefer tutorials where I’m allowed to play the game instead of reading the Haynes Manuel on how to deconstruct a U32 by every nut and bolt. City of Gangsters bends the two styles with a characterized explanation from your uncle as he hands the business down to you to control. That is reasonable enough and though it is easy enough to blast through, it might take some more time to completely get a handle on everything.

In-game you can customize your small avatar and background, giving yourself more detail than the general vagueness of your lengthy tutorial play. I think the tutorial could be more succinct and gameplay-focused, though it functions pretty well in getting you started in your life of crime. It is not filled with 4X levels of depth, but with a massive map and a complex set of relationships to contend with you’ll see a reasonable depth to explore. Then you have to combat the multiple thugs running their syndicate on the massive maps.

Commanding and expanding your syndicate one corner of Chicago (and DLC or workshop-created cities) at a time, you build up backroom booze productions and protection rackets. You also hire new crew members to manage your businesses, bribe cops, and even get into a number of conflicts with thugs. At the point that I “found” a shotgun which just happened to “fall off the back of a truck and into my hands, at which point it inexplicably went off and killed several low-level gangsters at different times of the year,” your honor, City of Gangsters got a little easy.

You see, City of Gangsters does one trick and does it moderately well for a short while. What is that trick? City of Gangsters is only a management game in the same way that the bloke at Mcdonald’s ordering the weekly stock of the thing that used to go Moo is a bigger criminal than Alphonse Capone. Then again, he is the reason there is that weird smell by the bins, so he should be convicted of 5 counts of tax evasion and sentenced to death, according to the banal Karens.

What you are doing the majority of the time is stock-taking so some automated systems that you set up can sell your products and pick up the cash. The only reason you are most likely doing that more often than your hired goons is because, for the life of me, I couldn’t get them to reliably pick up the stoneware crooks. The crooks themselves couldn’t pick up some pots from our suppliers so we could keep production on a roll. I had to go around doing that hoping everyone had some in stock and I had enough room in the car.

This was either through my inability to grasp the basic automation of giving your crew orders to repeatedly follow, or the fact no one had any stock because you need at least 50 of the things every four turns. My crew just wasn’t the “well-oiled machine” that the Steam description compliments so much. When the systems work, they work really well, it is just a crapshoot of whether or not you’ll get production done on time thanks to incompetence, unattainable stock, or whatever you call going out for deliveries before production has even finished. I think the first one covered the former and the latter.

I think the relationships aspect can get a little messy. Your expansionist ideas to run everything in the South Loop might ruffle unexpected feathers and block some previously reliable trade. In a menu within a menu within a further menu, you’ll find who knows who, and this will give you an idea of why ruffing up a timber salesman will annoy the local butcher that buys lots of home brew. I’m here to protect you when Hannah “Tony” Montana gets ideas of going from a jumped-up thug and he becomes a dead man. So pay me or find someone who will.

Running a small corner operation, this isn’t so much of an issue. When you are running a whole section of Chicago and banging on the door of rivals on your level, the complexity of your relationships becomes a little more subtle. You are no longer just concerned with your uncle’s friends and known business associates, you are now reaching far beyond your little block and requesting businesses that have little to no knowledge of you to pay up. Your profit matters, but so does your reputation as this is how you grow and earn further respect and money.

Of course, being focused on business, you have a currency that is marked up with a couple of Billy Fs. The other “currency” in your pocket is your charming smile and the number of favors you accrue through helping the community or dealing with a problem. These favors get you a number of things: Gossip, new hires, new backrooms where you can produce your legitimate merchandise, invites to the places where you might find the right people, places to spend a little money to make a lot of money (if you know what I mean), and so on.

Seemingly generating the placement of businesses and your rival street thugs through some form of procedural generation, some of your success might be defined by the generation. That or you can use the custom cities which are based on some values to give the City of Gangsters‘ map creation tool a chance to generate christ knows what abomination from the dustbin of city planning disasters. This is of course the problem with some random generation, it can clash with the larger systems at play and you have to drive a bit further from your starting operation to get basic stock.

For me, it is often the Stoneware crooks as I often work exclusively in ciders, beers, moonshine, or brick wine, that sort of thing. Nothing that will get me in too much trouble or become too much of an issue in stocktaking, but enough that I’m never staying still. Neutral Alcohol is another one that is often difficult to come by, of course, it is used for Moonshine and seemingly never in my local area. You would think it was illegal to have it or something.

As an attempt to succeed Hothouse Creations’ late 90s and early 2000s Gangsters series, City of Gangsters does a fine job at putting together a lot of management in your hands. Though towards the late game, the level of micro-management gets a little ridiculous as you have to keep on top of everything. There is money in your warehouses to pay employees, the warp core is stabilized, the UN (which doesn’t exist yet) has tea and biscuits, and all the little children get paid by The Rock for their teeth. I don’t think there is a segment of business that isn’t simulated.

Ultimately, City of Gangsters could use some refinement to make it entirely understandable. Though as is, the early and mid-level of management gameplay alongside the integration of the relationships makes the latest title from the Project Highrise developers reasonably unique. At some point, I might even bother to pick up the many DLCs to add a few more complexities to the fold, though on its own City of Gangsters is a solid management title that might lean too heavily in some directions too often.

A PC copy of City of Gangsters was provided by Kasedo Games for the purposes of this review.

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City of Gangsters

$29.99

7

Score

7.0/10

Pros

• A great management-sim under micromanaging.
• A great simple art direction.
• I don't know what happened to that shotgun, your honor.

Cons

• The late game is a lot of micromanaging.
• The tutorial could be a touch better.