Gangsters 2: Vendetta
As Joey Bane, you'll have the opportunity to hire a number of gangster henchmen (and their henchmen as well) to further your cause, some of which add more to your organization than just muscle. Gangsters can come equipped with specialties, such as bombing or kidnapping, and, in weirdly out-of-place role-playing fashion, you can add skill levels to their main traits (such as shooting and stealth)-- assuming they survive the mission in which they're active. You can also hire specialists. These people run your illegal businesses -- which you can establish covertly in some of the legitimate operations running in your territory. For instance, if you hire a gambling manager and position him in an underground casino, you can rake in much more loot than if you were to rely on the earnings of your convenience store (which the casino doubles as during the daytime) alone.
Successfully completing each successive mission requires that you accomplish one or more objectives, which the narrator and your personal advisor inform you of throughout the game. Objectives include such mundane assignments as taking over rival businesses, stealing kidnap victims, and, of course, eliminating enemy mobsters. To help you on your way, you can bribe the local police force, buy weapons and cars (for drive-bys), and even occasionally hire hit men to do your work for you. Also, your personal advisor pops up every now and again to let you know when one of your businesses is being attacked or when a specialist has come available for activating one of your illegal operations.
Gangsters 2 sports a sharp, simplified interface (compared to the original Gangsters), a full 24-hour-day time cycle (unruly behavior is more likely to occur and go unchecked by police at night), and a '20s/Prohibition-era Chicagoesque setting. Developer Hothouse Creations gave the game a more focused feel than its predecessor, but despite the work that apparently went into it, Gangsters 2 still embodies much of the original's vapid gameplay.
For starters, it seems Hothouse went the cheap route by having the narrator and all of the gangsters voiced by the same actor. The actor delivers his weasely gangster-speak slowly and laboriously. The story is incredibly linear, and the action is guided by the narrator to such a degree that after each mission's introductory sequence, you practically already know how the entire mission will play out. The missions are tedious for their monotony to begin with; knowing exactly what you have to do only serves to kill all opportunity for excitement and surprise. Almost invariably, each mission will require you to set up a number of illegal businesses in order to earn enough money to support your muscle (who'll abandon you if you run out of money). After you have enough muscle, you'll have to use them to penetrate the enemy territory, usually claiming some of the enemy's businesses along the way, and then do a couple of drive-bys on the enemy bosses.
This work plays out relatively similarly in each mission. In fact, save for the size of the territory, many of the missions are indistinguishable from each other. The colorful live-action map screens (quickly accessible via your mouse's scroll wheel) are excellently designed for carrying out your missions, but the game's main screen is crowded with way too many similar-looking brick buildings. Based on appearance alone, it's often hard to tell which building you have targeted for a takeover, and in which building your hideaway is located. Because of that, you'll probably be spending too much time on the map screens and not enough time taking in the action on the main screen. Which will disappoint you, because aside from the crowd of buildings onscreen, the bustling main screen is fun to watch. Trolleys and vehicles roam by, bystanders make their way to and fro, and chalk outlines along the streets and sidewalks mark the places where the game's many, many murder victims lost their lives.
The designers made some smart moves with the interface and control. You can pause the game anytime by hitting the spacebar, and attacking enemies is as simple as clicking on them. However, some real boners crept into the design as well. For example, on the map screens, you can hold your cursor over a dot -- which represents a person on the main screen-to find out who that person is and to select that person for attack (if he or she is a bad guy). Unfortunately, this same simplicity wasn't carried over to the main screen. You can still specify attacks from the main screen, but there's no pop-up help to tell you the name of the person you're attacking. Also, in many of the missions, enemy cars are represented in yellow on the map screens, but so are those of non-enemies, so you often have to pause the game to stop the action long enough for you to hover your cursor over a car to find out if it's one you want to track the movement of.
Speaking of design blunders, the game's biggest shortcoming is in enemy AI. If you set up guards around any of your buildings and enemy gangsters have set their sights on one of those buildings, they won't give up their attack until they're fully dead. Oh, they'll turn a corner to get away from your guards' gunfire, but then they'll turn around and come right back, even though at this point they're highly outnumbered.
The characters in the game all lack any semblance of personality. They all have unique "gangster" names, such as "Lightning" and "Tux," but you never see them interact in cutscenes, and none of your hired gangsters ever make their way into the narrator's story line. This utter lack ends up sucking the life out of Gangsters 2. Specialists have the same problem: they're unique in terms of name and ability, but they never interact with you or any of the other characters.
Overall, the game has a sort of generalized, sketchy feel to it. Sure, you can buy rifles, Tommy guns, explosives, and three different kinds of cars, and you can run a distillery, a brewery, a speakeasy, and a craps game, but everything feels narrowed down to the point of oversimplicity. Better guns make for quicker killing, and riskier businesses make for better income, but everything in the game suffers from a degree of separation. You never get to see buildings from the inside, your gangsters never express a preference for one weapon or automobile over another, and your businesses lack accompanying sound effects to enhance the illusion or to differentiate them from each other.
As with the original, the concept behind Gangsters 2 is great, but the execution suffers tremendously. Graphics and sound shortcomings could easily be attended to, but the gameplay needs a lot of work. It's not so much that you don't have different options for choosing what to do in each mission, it's just that once you've chosen your route of action, there's little variety to what you see taking place onscreen. Your gangsters run or drive around each city, shooting at and trading building ownership with the enemy gangsters for the duration of each mission. That's pretty much it. The story feels tacked on, the characters are weak, weak, weak, and the little attentions to detail-such as the gangsters flying through the air when shot and photographers coming by to snap photos of the chalk-outline-littered sidewalks-are misplaced. Hothouse Creations would have done better to give the game a more authentic feel and to differentiate the units and structures from each other.
We still think they're on to something, though, with this whole gangsters thing, so we'll hold out for the next iteration and hope that the third time around will be the charm.