16 out of 16 people found this review helpful.
Gangsters Hold Computer Hostage
Date of Review: Dec 17, 2000
I had been thinking about purchasing Gangsters for some time when I was approached online by someone who was willing to trade his copy of the game for my copy of The Operational Art of War (TalonSoft). Since I found TAOW excruciatingly painful to play, I decided to give it a go. Nothing could be worse than that.
First, a bit about the object of the game. You are the head of a 1930's era gang. You start out with a small number of hoods who carry out your orders. The object is to take control of the city. This is accomplished by recruiting more hoods, purchasing weapons and vehicles, collecting protection money from shop owners, running illegal rackets (gambling halls, whorehouses, etc...) and destroying the other gangs in town.
There is a lot of information to manage in the game. You can wind up with quite a large number of hoods working for you, as well as accountants and lawyers. Each gang member can be ordered to perform a variety of tasks. You make orders at the start of each game week, then click a button. You can watch as the gangsters carry out your orders (at various speed settings). Really neat concept, I thought. Now on to my experience with the game.
The CD arrived in the mail in pristine condition. I dropped it in the disc drive and installed without a hitch. Then, after firing it up, I was allowed to play for less than 10 minutes before the entire system locked up. I rebooted and started the game again only to find the game menu had all options darkened out except one which, in big white letters proclaimed, 'QUIT'.
Needless to say, I spent quite some time trying to solve this vexing, and repeating, problem. On several occasions the menu screen locked up my computer, forcing me to power off. A visit to the Eidos website and the Gangsters bulletin board proved that I was not the only one in this boat. The copy protection runs interference when 'some' systems try to read the game music. Both of my systems (distinctly different in make, model and accessories) just happen to belong to that group.
I was finally able to play by disabling music in the game. Simple solution. However, the gameplay was nothing like I expected. It's repetitive and becomes stale after an hour. The user interface is nicely designed, but not very intuitive. On top of that, there's so much to keep track of that all of the information management became distracting and ruined any hope of immersion.
The thing I found most annoying was the message system. While your gangsters are running around carrying out their assignments, you get messages for anything and everything. They appear in a dialog box (which you have to open manually, by the way) and come in so fast at times you can't read them all. For example, each time a shop owner in your territory (or one of your hoods) sees a hood from another gang, you get an 'I saw so-and-so at this location' message. You have an option to filter certain types of messages, but then you might miss something important. It would have been much better if the messages had been displayed in a corner of the screen.
With all the negatives I've had to say, I suppose I should add that the graphics were rather nice. The best part of the game is watching your gangsters run around town. You have a nice sized city in which to play. The map is displayed in a 2D isometric view (like StarCraft or Commandos). The buildings have nice detail and the gangsters look like gangsters. One of the best effects, I think, comes when blowing up a building. The explosions are well done.
The sound effects are average. I see nothing special there. However, the game does sport a decent AI (which gets even better with a patch you can download from Eidos - which does not fix the CD problems). If you tell your hoods to shoot an enemy gangster, or blow up a building, they'll take care of it as swiftly as they can unless the cops are around. They actually appear to be trying to look innocent while waiting to blow up a building surrounded by cops.
Bottom line: I wouldn't pay cash for this game. Even if your system is not one of the 'few' which chokes on the CD copy protection, the gameplay just isn't worth it.
