Omerta: City of Gangsters Preview

Organized crime of the 1920s ran a shadow economy that reflected all America's vices and hypocrisies. Headed by savvy "legitimate" businessmen like "Bugsy" Siegel, Meyer Lansky, "Scarface" Al Capone, and Albert "The Mad Hatter" Anastasia, just to name a few, they engaged in their own forms of war, business, and diplomacy. Haemimont's Omerta: City of Gangsters is trying to do it all in one game. I've played a few missions from the campaign and toyed a bit with the sandbox, and so far it gets a lot of things right about its subject matter. At the same time, it's left me with some big reservations that I hope are addressed either later in the campaign or in the final release version.

Little Bit of This, Little Bit of That

What Omerta gets right is atmosphere and straightforwardness. When I first came to Atlantic City it was being washed by sheets of rain, and you could see the reflections of passing cars in the puddles collecting on the pavement. A pleasant, jazzy soundtrack accompanied the action as I started building an empire from the Boardwalk to Baltic Ave.


It's a snap to hire new gangsters, build new businesses, and send a crew on missions. Different types of buildings are labeled with large, easy-to-read icons. If I wanted to do something at a building, like open a soup kitchen to win over public opinion, I could just click on it and then task one of my crew of gangsters to do the job. It takes just a few minutes to learn the basic controls for just about everything you will do in Omerta.

From time to time, however, you have to go to the mattresses. Mob wars are fought in turn-based tactical RPG squad combat that looks a bit like XCOM and Jagged Alliance, by gangster-archetypes soldiers like "Squigs" the burglar and "Doc" the mastermind. The tactical view is full of nice details -- I fought a midnight shootout in an Atlantic City bank that took me from the heavy security door of the vault, through the back offices, out to the tellers' windows (each with a green bankers' lamp next to it), and finally into a nicely appointed lobby with marble floors and posh-looking furniture, battling cops and state troopers with every step toward my getaway car.

What's All That Racket?

A clean interface made it easy to spot cover points and use my mobsters' special abilities to their best effect. Picking the "dance for me" ability that my two-gun specialist had cast an area-of-effect cone in front of him that laid down morale-sapping suppression fire on his targets. My sniper could, as you might expect, cast a "snipe" circle on the map where all his shots would have a high probability of hitting; I had him picking off cops as they took cover near the entrance of the bank. It's far from Jagged Alliance-levels of complexity, but that's probably appropriate here -- these are thugs, not soldiers, and combat isn't the main focus of Omerta.


When I wasn't gunning down gangsters and coppers, I was overseeing a burgeoning criminal empire in Prohibition-era Atlantic City, and mastering business concepts like vertical integration and synergy as they apply to things like speakeasies, distilleries, and pharmacies. I also learned how to conduct a hostile takeover, mob style: you can always shut down competition with a drive-by shooting, or you can supplement your supply stockpile by robbing another criminal.

The economy is straightforward: beer and liquor are the cornerstones of Omerta's illicit economy, but there are more lucrative opportunities to be seized. Running a speakeasy is all well and good, and generates a lot of "dirty" money, but a pharmacy takes hard liquor and sells it for clean cash that you don't even need to launder. In one mission, I started a protection racket that skimmed a cut from every independent business on the map. Since it was being choked out by some other protection rackets, reducing its profits, I bought guns from other criminals in the city and used them to conduct drive-bys on my competitors. In no time, my protection racket was the only one in the city, and it was making buckets of cash. When the police launched an investigation into the crime wave that I'd started, I pinned it on another bootlegger and took over his business after the cops shut him down. Then I decided to get into the union business to both rake-in cash, and improve my reputation in the city. That made it easier to strike new deals.

Putting Up a Fight

One thing that worries me is that Omerta might be so easy that it won't satisfy strategy gamers, and yet too much of a business-management game to please those who just want to fight mob wars. In most missions I've played, it doesn't take long until my business is just kind of humming along, making nice profits without much input from me. When crime gets out of hand and the local cops launch an investigation, it's way too easy to get the investigation shut down by feeding the cops another criminal or paying a modest bribe. Omerta just doesn't seem like it's putting up enough of a fight at times.


This is just a preview build, of course, and things could get rougher later on -- I'm hoping they do. There's clear potential here and a lot of style, and if Omerta can avoid the pitfalls of being too simple and too easy, we might have an honest-to-goodness mob strategy game on our hands. After misfires like Mob Rule and The Godfather, I'm as nervous as a Corleone at a toll booth, but with Tropico 3 and 4 under its belt, Haemimont might have a sweet little racket on its hands here.