City of Gangsters Gameplay Preview – Prohibition Era Business Sim

City of Gangsters is a prohibition era business sim. In other words, you are a respectable gangster starting a respectable business in the area of home brewing some bootleg liquor. I say respectable because you aren’t some auntie making gin in her bathtub, you’re starting an (i)legitimate, large scale brewing operation.

The game is pretty complex and has a lot of depth as most management sims do. City of Gangsters stands out in that you have direct control over your units. You move your agents around the city and interact with other business owners as you form a network of connections to help your operation.

It’s more akin to a turn based strategy game. Your gangsters have an allotted number of movement and action points so you have to plan your action for that day a little bit carefully. You start the game out by selling the stockpile of pre prohibition booze you had lying around in order to generate some starter cash.

After making enough money, you build a brewing factory in a warehouse to start the production of home brewed beer. Meanwhile, you’re talking to every business owner on the streets to form business connections to buy brewing supplies and to find distributors for your product.

As you expand your business, you need to set up fronts and bribe police officers to keep control over that street corner. Running a respectable business costs a lot so you will have to gently convince some business owners to cough up protection money. It’s honestly for their own good.

As the business scales upwards, you run into more things to manage and it becomes a pretty deep management sim. It really does feel like I’m running a small business of sorts.

Overall, City of Gangsters is a pretty well made business management sim. I like how you have direct control over your units. It gives you more control over the game as well as gives you more things to do. The turn based mechanics are easy to get into as well as it gives you plenty of time to think and plan out what you want to do without creating any pressure. It’s a deep game and getting into it may be a bit difficult at first but once you do, you’ll get hooked on making sure your business succeeds, at any cost.