City of Gangsters Preview

City of Gangsters is an Early Access strategy game that is planned to be released later this year. From the developers SomaSim, the aim of the game is to try to build a gangsters paradise instead of a travellers paradise in their new game.

SomaSim builds on what was established with their last game Project Highrise and they have expanded it massively. Here, instead of building giant skyscrapers, you are building a huge operation of crimes like money laundering, burglaries and other get-rich-quick schemes.

The game doesn’t do a great job at introducing you to the gameplay at the moment; there is no tutorial in sight and you are left to your own devices. It’s worth noting that this is a preview version and that is probably why there isn’t a tutorial, nevertheless I found that the game was quite easy to learn. Once you get in the swing of things you will be running the city in no time.

The reason why you’ll be able to learn the game in no time is due to the simplistic design of the game. This definitely isn’t a bad thing as the whole game works like a perfect chain, with one reaction leading to another leading to a bigger action. This is great as not only does the game pull you in early with the satisfying gameplay loop, but it also makes it a game that anyone can enjoy regardless of experience in strategy games. It’s also worth mentioning that the simplistic gameplay means that micromanagement is kept to a minimum. The UI is also super realistic and easy to understand.

City of Gangsters really tries to keep things easy, it really doesn’t push too many types of ideas and gameplay mechanics and sticks to having a strategy game that is solely focused on building your criminal empire. While it could focus a bit more on the city aspects, by letting you build the city and expand it, the game instead decides to keep it straightforward and I think it benefits the game rather than hurting it.

You expand your empire by spreading your ideas to local businesses, gaining politicians as friends and just reaching people by word of mouth. While this is a good system and has a lot of positives I believe that the game could benefit from a propaganda type system. Whilst you aren’t in political power, you are controlling a city just from the perspective of illegal criminals instead of politicians.

City of Gangsters runs incredibly well. Whilst it isn’t a graphic masterpiece that will kill your GPU for trying to run it, I was able to run the game at a solid 1080p and 240 frames per second without a single frame drop. I believe that this game is playable even on the most basic laptops, which is a great thing.

Sticking with the simple theme, the combat in City of Gangsters is incredibly un-complicated. This means you won’t be living out your wildest fantasies of beating someone to death and sticking a horse's head on their wife’s pillow. It allows the game to spend less time on combat and more time on strategy.

Whilst this preview has been overly positive thus far, there are some issues that I found during my time with the game.

The first issue that I found was that the music doesn’t offer a lot of variety. There is either only one soundtrack, or all the soundtracks sound deadly similar. There also isn’t any voice acting, instead the game tells its story through written dialogue. While there isn’t anything inherently wrong with written dialogue, it just doesn’t pull you into the story as much as voice acting would. I found that I really just didn’t care about the story that the game offers due to there not being voice acting, which is quite sad as there really could have been a great story here.

There are also no procedurally-generated maps, instead the game has you choose between a few maps to start on. Whilst this isn’t a necessity in 2021, this would be a welcomed feature and perhaps it could be integrated in the future. Not only do pre-generated maps kill the longevity of the game it also makes the game very predictable, because you get the feeling of once you have beaten a map, every playthrough will be the same.

There are also a few more issues, from the car pathing being odd with NPC’s going nowhere, to the barricades that provide nothing to the game. While there are issues, it’s important to note that this game is still in development and many of the downsides that I have pointed out in this preview may not exist when the game releases, we will let you know when our full review comes out later this year.

Overall I enjoyed my time with City of Gangsters, while there are some issues at the moment like being unable to save your games in the cloud, or the AI that just doesn’t provide a challenge to you. I’m sure that most of these issues can be ironed out before the launch later this year.