Empire of Sin

A genuinely original pitch

Empire of Sin's premise doesn't have an obvious precedent, and reviewers said so at launch: run a criminal empire during Prohibition-era Chicago, blending XCOM-style turn-based squad combat with Civilization-style territory control and inter-gang diplomacy, choosing from a roster of historical and fictional crime bosses. It's from Romero Games, the Galway-based studio led by John Romero — co-creator of Doom and Quake — working alongside his wife and longtime collaborator Brenda Romero, and published by Paradox Interactive, better known for grand-strategy titles than tactical RPGs. "This game combines XCOM like combat with Civilization like diplomacy all set in 1920s Chicago," reads one detailed review, framing exactly what made the concept stand out. "This is due to the fact that this game combines... and it really has no modern games to compare it to."

Critics were moderately receptive — Metacritic settled at 69, a "fair" rather than strong score — and Steam's lifetime rating landed at almost exactly the halfway point: 50.1% positive of 3,317 reviews, one of the most evenly split scores in this review series. That split isn't noise; it's a real, close disagreement about whether the execution matched the idea.

Where the game falls short of its own pitch

The negative half of that split is specific and consistent. Bugs dominate the launch-week sample: "disappearing gangsters," broken AI, and enough visible rough edges that one reviewer asked pointedly, "Did you just forget to mark this piece of software as 'Early Access'?!" Another, posted the same week, describes losing an entire squad in the first real fight to randomized placement and unlucky critical hits, before the player had a fair chance to develop a strategy.

The deeper structural complaint, though, is about the half of the pitch that isn't combat. Multiple detailed reviews describe the empire-management layer — the Civilization-style diplomacy and territory control the concept explicitly promises — as thin to the point of non-functional. "The base 'management' aspect is basically non-existent. You take buildings and put a category on them," reads one representative review. Combat itself draws a specific, pointed comparison: several reviewers directly weigh it against XCOM: Chimera Squad, a tactical game Firaxis released the same year, and find Empire of Sin's version shallower and less balanced — your character becomes overpowered quickly enough that difficulty flattens out well before the campaign's later stages.

A real effort, then a broken promise

To Romero Games' credit, the response to launch criticism wasn't nothing. In the months after release, the studio formed a Community Council of dedicated players specifically to guide post-launch fixes, and shipped several substantial patches addressing complaints about Safehouses, adding a combat auto-resolve option, and — in the December 2021 "Gangster" update — introducing a weapon-proficiency system aimed at giving combat more tactical texture. That's a genuine, sustained effort, not a token gesture. It wasn't received uniformly well, either: one detailed review flags the 1.05 patch specifically as making balance worse rather than better, and warns that certain Deluxe Edition items stopped working correctly as a result — a case where a fix aimed at one problem reportedly created another for paying customers.

Then, by 2023, that effort stopped entirely. Paradox Interactive's own support communications confirmed the game was no longer being updated, and a second expansion pack — one some players had already paid for as part of a season pass — was never released. It's a specific, dateable case of a studio and publisher walking away from a paid commitment rather than the game simply fading from relevance, and it's the detail that separates Empire of Sin from a merely disappointing launch: this is a game where part of what you bought was formally promised and never delivered.

Verdict

Empire of Sin deserves credit for a genuinely original concept and a real, if ultimately insufficient, post-launch effort — the Community Council and the year of substantial patches were more than many studios manage after a rocky launch. But the core pitch — deep management layered under tactical combat — never fully delivered on either half, by wide critical and player consensus, and the story ends with an outright abandonment in 2023 that left a paid expansion permanently unreleased. The premise is worth encountering on a deep sale; the promise the game made to its earliest, most invested buyers was not kept.