Gangsters 2 Preview

Crime may not pay, but you would have had a hard time trying to convince the Prohibition-era mob bosses of that. When the taps ran dry under the 1919 Volstead Act, organized crime made sure the liquor would continue to flow. Between bootlegging and racketeering, mafiosi like Al Capone and archrival George "Bugs" Moran garnered vast wealth and power, plus more than a little notoriety. In a nation founded by dissenters, revolutionaries, and individualists, criminals who openly scoff at the law have seemingly always had a certain dark appeal.

With its 1998 release of Gangsters, developer Hothouse Creations tried to tap into the mystique of 1920s gangsterism with an interesting, if flawed, blend of turn-based empire builder and real-time strategy game. Your goal in that game is to is to create a criminal empire in the fictional, Chicago-like city of New Temperance. By analyzing a large array of message windows, graphs, and charts, you plan the coming week's strategy while keeping an eye on your competition across town. You issue orders to your thugs, telling them to recruit new hoods, extort local business, or take out enemy mobsters, all with the goal of raising profits and gaining territory. You then switch from this static planning phase to a real-time mode, where you watch and aid your thugs at "work" in an animated 2D city.

While the fundamental concepts behind Gangsters are rife with potential, many players feel the game suffers from a cluttered, confused interface and inadequate instructions. Trying to follow your nefarious activities in the city during the real-time segments also prove overly difficult at times. With its upcoming sequel, Gangsters 2, Hothouse hopes to build on the ideas behind the original Gangsters, while avoiding its pitfalls. We played an incomplete alpha build of the new game, and based on what we've seen, it looks like Hothouse may well hit its target.

If even a virtual life of crime might not seem appealing to you, the game offers a good hook to reel you in. The character you play may be a crook, but he's a sympathetic one. Joey Bane returns home from the army to the fictional state of Temperance just in time for tragedy to strike. His father, trying to make ends meet, gets killed while working for the mob, and his uncle is badly wounded. With revenge in his heart and mentoring from his uncle, Joey proceeds to track down his father's killers, eventually squaring off against the state's most powerful mob boss, Frankie Constantine.

Prohibition-era president Calvin Coolidge declared, "The chief business of the American people is business." Gangsters 2 takes that dictum to heart: For you, it will mean a lot of shady, violent--and fun--business. The game is played as an episodic campaign, with each of the 20 missions introduced by a black-and-white animated cutscene, followed by a description of your mission goals, and some tips for accomplishing them. The campaign begins with your trying to avenge the death of your father by sending one of your henchmen after his killers. Naturally, one vendetta leads to another since the mobsters in the game take the "eye for an eye" policy seriously. Gang wars escalate, and your power will grow as you proceed through each of the missions, moving from city to city and county to county. In addition to the solo game, Gangsters 2 will also offer a full multiplayer mode, which lets you challenge other players via Internet, modem, or serial connection. You'll then be able to check rankings to see how you've fared compared to other players.

New and Improved

If you played the first game, the first thing you'll notice about Gangsters 2 is that the gameplay focus and pacing have shifted. Where the earlier game largely centered on empire building, Gangsters 2 focuses more on goal-oriented missions with greater action--though empire building certainly isn't neglected. You'll have specific tasks like killing certain gangsters, defending your territory from bomb attacks, or rescuing a hostage from a rival gang. Instead of checking your organization in detail at the end of each week, you can both follow the status of your territory and control your henchmen at any time. Gameplay will likely seem better integrated, not to mention more action-packed, since there seems to be more emphasis placed on your gangsters' actions and less on amassing economic power.

While Gangsters 2 will be streamlined compared to its predecessor, there will still be a fair amount of information to track. Fortunately, you not only can pause the game at any time, but you can also issue orders even when the game has been paused. Calling up the most important information windows will automatically pause the game as well, saving you the trouble. The pause command isn't the only aid at your disposal. The first Gangsters was criticized for poor documentation and a weak tutorial. Hothouse seems intent on making its new game more accessible. It will feature a tutorial that introduces you to the gameplay and interface via a hands-on approach that builds on each concept. A subtitled voice-over explains a concept, then highlights the appropriate items onscreen to let you try it out. Additionally, there will be a hypertext help feature that explains the game's displays, controls, and concepts. Pop-up tooltips explain interface buttons when you hold the mouse over them for a few seconds. At the beginning of your campaign, you can also choose from three difficulty levels to help ease you into the game.

Though the interface in the first Gangsters could easily get cluttered and become hard to follow, Hothouse has rectified that with the sequel. A central window shows the city featured in your current mission from three easily selectable viewing levels. In this space you can call up a number of other status windows. There's a newspaper to track events in the city, an advisor to brief you on your objectives and offer tips and warnings as events unfold, and a data sheet about each building in the city, telling you who owns it, how much profit it reaps, and so on.

Menu bars on the left and top of the screen let you control the main units in the game, your personal gangster lieutenants. With a mouse click or two, you can easily select them, center the screen on them, add or subtract "muscle" (lesser thugs) within their detachment, switch weapons, and so on. You issue orders through a context-sensitive cursor that lets a selected gangster and his muscle enter a building, blast an opponent in a drive-by shooting, or steal one of your rival's cars, for example. Standard orders like guarding a building or patrolling an area are accessible via buttons on the left side of the screen. Each gangster has a variety of attributes and skills like aggression, combat effectiveness, and stealth, but some have special skills like assassination, and you can easily select these from the left menu as well.

Final Thoughts

One thing to look forward to in the game is the visual presentation. Gangsters 2 has style in spades. The menu splash screen sets the theme, featuring a gangster blazing away with a Tommy gun from the side of a slick '20s auto. Stylish and effectively brief black-and-white cutscenes help draw you into the emotional side of the story. The image of your father's grave briefly highlighted by lightning during a night storm is a particularly nice touch. It's melodramatic, but melodrama suits the theme well. The game interface has a unified style that feels appropriate to the era, with a number of information windows featuring lined columns like a ledger book.

The main city view is where you'll spend much of your time, and it's quite a sight. The tenements, speakeasies, and brothels all exude a Roaring Twenties ambience with their distinctively antique architectural features. Small details like skylights, vents, and potted plants on the roofs add to the believability and color of each city. The game features a full day and night cycle, and it's fun to watch twilight descend and see ornate streetlights blink on. Gangsters 2 also features changes in weather, so some missions take place in the rain or show snow on the ground. Each city is presented with a 2D isometric view, and building levels temporarily vanish as you pan across them to let you track the action on the streets. As in the first Gangsters, the city streets seem alive with activity. Pedestrians of all stripes pass by, cops walk their beats, and cars zip past. The animations are fun to watch and feature clever little touches. When one of your gangsters rubs out an enemy, a chalk outline is left on the ground after the body disappears. A point of concern right now is that, as in the first game, you have relatively little control over how combat plays out. You can issue an order to target someone, but after that your hoods pretty much act on their own.

At this stage in the game's development, the sound still needs a lot of work, and apparently the game is still using some placeholders here. The voice-overs in the tutorial and mission introductions are currently presented by a man with a decidedly English accent. (The developer is based in England.) Gangsters are voiced in a very cartoony, exaggerated style. One element that's already sounding quite nice at this point is the score. The dark and brooding jazz-tinged main theme quickly draws you into the gangster milieu.

Even based on an incomplete, early build of the game, Gangsters 2 looks as if it will likely avoid a number of the weaknesses that hurt its predecessor. It also seems like Hothouse has a strong feel for evoking a Roaring Twenties atmosphere through visuals and music. What remains to be seen is how the move from partially turn-based gameplay to more real-time action will play out. It will be interesting to see if Hothouse possibly alienates some fans of the first game or draws a whole new group of gamers into the Gangsters family.