19 out of 19 people found this review helpful.
Gangsters - Real Annoying!
Date of Review: May 28, 2000
I bought this game for two very honorable reasons. I've got a fascination with the mafia (I've watched Goodfellas about a hundred times, read Wiseguy and know a great deal of the mafia) and two, it was cheep. When I bought this game it was only about twenty bucks, so the combination of my cheepness and love for the mafia lead me to buying this game.
When I first started playing it, I was hooked. I sat down for four hours strait and got tuned into the game, carefully assigning people to their specific catagories and planning out my extortion routes so that they'd work best. It seemed like the best game ever. I had total control over the territories around me, the cops were keeping quiet, and my men controlled about one fourth of the board.
Then, the dreaded annoyance began and never stopped.
In about the fourth week of the game, mafia members from the other team started coming into my territory. They started taking the businesses that I was extorting money out of, and there was barely anything I could do. I tried giving them 'beating' warnings, where you attack them with a bat or something, but they usually either ran away, (to come back later) or killed my guy with a gun.
So now my businesses that I was extorting were getting taken by the enemy character (the computer). I got fed up after a couple weeks and started killing members of their family. This only lead to my own people being arrested though, costing me more and more money. And then, I had been so busy with the killings, that they'd managed to take over more than half my extorted businesses.
What does this all mean to you, the clueless consumer? It means that this game gets really really really really really BAD after you've been playing it for a while. The computer somehow sneeks into your territory and just starts to take over, and there's not really anything you can do.
And say you do get a handle on your territory ... then what? Well then you have to find the enemy's base and take it over or blow it up. Alright, once you start playing the game you're realize how impossible this is! The board in this game is HUGE! It's like they litteraly took new york and popped it down. Just think about how LONG it would take for a group of fifteen to twenty men to search through every building in New York. Hard? Well that's pretty much exactly what you have to do in this game.
Another thing that bugged me about this game is it's innacuracy. If you're going to build a game about the mafia, at least make it accurate! If this town was really run by the mafia, you'd start out with a group of lawyers, accountants, bookies, and businesses on your side thanks to family ties. And you would never go 'recruit' people from the local docks or bars, as they couldn't be trusted.
What they should have done with this game was assigned you your group, and made you work around it rather than the town and enemies. But they didn't, so this game had to turn into more of a 'strategy war game' which isn't nearly what the mafia's about.
Basically, this game isn't worth the twenty bucks I spent on it. Some games that ARE worth the money, are (for those strategy fans) Warcraft and Starcraft, Red Alert, and especially Sim City 2000. And for those role playing fans, I'd suggest Final Fantasy VII and Fallout 2. They're all around 20 to 30 bucks now and are well worth the cash.
