Omerta: City of Gangsters Review

Omerta: City of Gangsters is one of the best bad strategy games I've ever played. It doesn't do many interesting things, but few games carry their shallowness with such style and polish.



It's honestly a baffling experience. All the usual signs of beginning a good game are here: it starts up fine, it looks good (Atlantic City on a rainy night is blustery and beautiful), and it's got a jazzy musical score that makes it sound like I'm embarking on a great bootlegging adventure in the 1920s. But I kept waiting for the real game to begin, and as one tutorial level dragged into another, I started to realize this pointless exercise was the real game. Developer Haemimont clearly lavished a lot of care and attention on Omerta's look and feel, but forgot to finish designing a game.

Welcome to MobsterVille

The problem is simple: Omerta is a strategy game that operates on Farmville-esque autopilot -- an exercise in vaguely pleasant boredom. Whether in the campaign or the sandbox mode, you play a mob kingpin who recruits other characters to join the gang, and build a criminal empire in Atlantic City. But here's where that illusion breaks down: there are no obstacles to success whatsoever. I built my criminal empire by... just building a criminal empire. It's literally a matter of renting some buildings and opening up a few speakeasies and protection rackets. Then you watch the money roll in. It will never stop.


While there are other businesses on the map, and even other gangsters, nobody else is playing the same game that we are. The other businesses are there to be bought off or bullied out of business, but it's not like there's an AI mob competing for the same territory and doing the same to you businesses. Therefore, every choice is basically meaningless, a different flavor of "illegal" activity in a lawless city. Build a speakeasy and a boxing arena or a boxing arena and a loan shark -- it really doesn't matter.

I Miss My Spreadsheet

Even Omerta's terrific graphics go to waste through a combination of poor interface design and lack of personality. You control your empire via an overhead map of the city and click on buildings to rent them and control the businesses you've established. But nothing I did felt like it changed the landscape. Which buildings can be used as sites for businesses is random, so even though the map is dotted with warehouses, swank hotels, and theaters, what they look like is irrelevant to your purposes. A speakeasy can fit inside a house as easily as it can a warehouse. There's not even an icon that changes to show what you've built. You just have to scroll around the map, clicking on everything you own to see what's going on there. It'd actually be easier to play from a spreadsheet view.


So forget about there being a strategy game here, or a useful sandbox mode like you find in other business games and city-builders. Omerta isn't really a strategy game, so the only interesting things happening here are the story and turn-based tactical combat. Which, as it turns out, aren't terribly good either. We're talking a standard "Immigrant comes to America and founds criminal empire" plot, with rivals including other gangs and the Ku Klux Klan (no one likes them).

Tactical Distraction

During each mission, there's a chance for some turn-based squad combat to occur. These fights, I'm sorry to say, are a poor man's XCOM. Each mobster under your command has different abilities and weapons, so it's good to bring a mix of gunmen and melee specialists. In keeping with the strategy game, the maps have lots of style but not a lot to make them tactically interesting. Cover points are fairly rare, but the AI just tends to charge in anyway. It's not totally devoid of tactics, and your gangster abilities can be important, like knowing when to use your healer's ability, or when to toss a grenade. But neither is it particularly good. It's certainly not interesting enough to stand up as a multiplayer game, which is all Omerta offers in that department. Also, the "strategic" layer and the battles don't really have much relation to one another, so the strategy just boils down to twiddling your thumbs, waiting to be forced into another middling tactical encounter.

And yet I'm not kidding or trying to be clever when I say this is a great bad game. There's something undeniably appealing about Omerta, even with all its dullness. I can't recommend it, but it was also one of those games that lets me just sort of zone out and have a little fun, even knowing it wasn't really a good strategy or tactics game. Of course, part of that fun was just imagining how great this would've been if Haemimont had finished the game design part of the equation.