Gangsters (Jewel Case)

by Gangsters for PC by Creative Wonders

Product Features

• If you secretly wish to extort your neighbors, gun down your enemies, cheat on your taxes, and build a massive criminal empire--but want to avoid the inconvenience of a long prison sentence--then Gangsters might be the game for you.
• angters transports you to a 1920s Chicago-style city for a gangland free-for-all. You start out as a small-time hood with big-time plans, and the only obstacles in your path to power are the cops, the G-men, and all the other gangsters that want you dead.
• So you go about recruiting hoods and extorting everything within your territory, all the while building and managing profitable public services such as booze distribution and well-lit brothels. It's a good gig until you're dead or in jail. So you want to avoid those unpleasantries by paying off cops and judges, while at the same time killing anyone who would do the same to you.
• Game play is a cross between an empire builder and a business simulation. Your goal is to take over the city and make a lot of dough. You've got to finance your expansion with your businesses (illegal as well as legit) and hold your territory with muscle. Since not too many venture capitalists are keen on giving seed money to thugs, enterprising hoodlums have to turn to their neighbors for cash. Luckily, your neighbors have plenty of money, and they're happy to fork it over if doing so means they can continue using their fingers.

Product Details

• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S.
• ASIN: B00002SAI2
• Media: CD-ROM
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #42,120 in Video Games (See Top 100 in Video Games)
• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes

Product Description

GameSpot Review

Hothouse Productions' Gangsters is part business simulation and part empire builder. It has at its disposal an interesting premise: 1920s Chicago-style gang warfare. It's a promising setup, but one that Gangsters fails to live up to.

A problematic interface starts everything off on the wrong foot. The game is a mishmash of buttons, overlays, and icons. The complexity of accomplishing anything in the game is daunting, and it's only made more so by the included tutorials, which only outline the very basics of playing. After much experimentation, you learn that your primary goals are relatively simple: hire hoods, extort businesses, and set up businesses of your own, both legitimate and otherwise. Once you get the knack of this, you begin dealing with rival gangs who are trying to take over your territory, kill your hoods, and destroy your businesses.

The game is divided into weeks. You split your hoods into teams and give them orders for the coming week. Under your command, these teams visit the local hangouts for potential recruits, collect protection money, expand your territory, run your businesses, and commit acts of violence (such as arson and bombing) on those local stores unwilling to aid your cause. These orders are then played out in real time, allowing you to watch your thugs in action and slightly modify their orders when the need arises. Then the week ends, and you repeat the process.

Once you begin to understand the interface and the mechanics, things look a little brighter. The combination of turn-based and real-time gameplay works well, and it's exciting to watch your territory expand. But one of Gangsters' biggest failings is that the game does not provide ample feedback. Finding out what happened in the preceding week can only be accomplished by consulting a variety of sources, all of which are incomplete and inadequate. There's no simple report that shows you who was killed, who paid you what, who isn't paying, and potential hotspots of rival gangster activity. All of this information is available, but not at one time and not in one place, making what should have been a simple task needlessly complex.

In fact, after numerous games it becomes apparent that Gangsters' complexity doesn't extend far beyond its interface. The combat is neither strategic nor tactical. Your hoods simply respond to the enemy based on a few factors, and you have little control. Diplomacy is almost nonexistent (a shame, considering the subject matter), consisting solely of a bar that allows you to set your aggression level with rivals and hope they do the same. And though there are three possible victory conditions, there is a proper path to victory - a path that is as dependent on you following a relatively stringent set of actions as it is on a number of random factors in the game.

The latter point is perhaps the game's most frustrating design problem. Numerous aspects of Gangsters are random, such as your starting location and the quality and quantity of hoods available to your recruiters each week. Since these factors are among the most important in the game, it's possible to find yourself in a hopeless situation within the first few weeks.

At least Gangsters looks good much of the time. The city is colorful, with detailed buildings, citizens scuttling around in period clothing and cars, and nice explosions. The overhead map, on the other hand, is a dull gray grid that provides little information. The sound effects are minimal, and the occasional voices of your gang sound good but without much variety. But on the downside, it's unfathomable why the designers chose a techno-tinged soundtrack instead of music that would have seemed appropriate to the subject matter.

In many ways, Gangsters recalls MicroProse's X-COM: Apocalypse, a game with a similar structure and a similarly bad interface. But a deep, rewarding game lurked beneath Apocalypse's murky top layer. Gangsters, on the other hand, feels like a prototype. The groundwork has been laid for a fascinating game, and Gangsters has many interesting features, but they don't come together in the big picture. With some refinement, a great game could emerge from the system. But as it stands, Gangsters opts for being complicated instead of complex. --Ron Dulin
--Copyright ©1998 GameSpot Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission of GameSpot is prohibited.

Product Description

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Organized crime on your PC, January 20, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Gangsters (Jewel Case) (CD-ROM)

I found this game to be very fun and stimulating.The game is quite difficult especially in handling your tasks once the week started.The wars with the other gangsters are very quick,sudden, and bloody, often with you losing more men than the enemy.My overall opinion of this game is it is pretty entertaining, but i hope now that Eidos will make another one without the difficulties of the first one.Now that the game type is out, I believe there will be more to follow.I believe this is a good game for the price.There will undoubtedly be more and better mafia games to come.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Just one word: A MASTERPIECE, January 2, 2002

By 

"sooi999" (Brecht Belgium) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Gangsters (Jewel Case) (CD-ROM)

I bought this game almost one year ago and I still like to play it (Such games are rather rare).
This game is so realistic! You give your orders at the start of a working week or during the weekend. This is realistic, because in the real world you can't be everywhere at the same moment and you can't give orders during your working week.
It's still fun because every game has different gangsters and the maps are each time randomly generated. No two games are the same.
If you want a game which will keep you busy for a while and you don't want to spend much money on it (only 10$!), I would say: BUY GANGSTERS

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Boss wants you to Buy this game, understand?, February 20, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Gangsters (Jewel Case) (CD-ROM)

Gangsters Organized Crime is, in my opinion, one of the best games ever made! I play it hour after hour, day after day, and it dosn't get old till you have to stop. The first time I saw it, I new I wanted it. I had never heard about it at all until I saw it. Finally I got it for my birthday. You can not believe how fun this game is. You start out designing your facial features from a pool of hair designes and faces. You even pick a nickname for yourself! Then you pick the gang color, the number of hoods, buisnesses, and money you have, and you'r of. Once playing you extort buildings so you can collect protection money. Buy buisnesses and send hoods to run them. Build illiegal buisnesses such as a speakeasy, casino, and lloan shark. While doing so you compete to gain control of the city from three other gangs. You purchase weapons and cars to take out the enemy. Order hits, bribes, and recruitments. You win when you have killed all other three gangsters, you become the mayor, or you go strait. I recomend that if you buy the game either buy the box with the manual, or wait for the sequal, which sounds even better. It does take a few hours to get the hang of it, but it's worth it. It is'nt worth paying five dollars less to not be able to enjoy this wonderful game. There are a few thing that I hope will be improved in the sequal. You can only order eighty hoods in one week, you can not frame your enimies, and it is hard to get territory once some one else has it. These are minor though, I highly recomend this game. However, it might pay to wait a few months for the sequel.