Gangsters 2 for Windows

In Gangsters 2 you, as a mobster, want to avenge you father?s murder. You submerge yourself into the underworld, and build an emporium of crime and extortion, with the final goal of sending your father?s murderers to Valhalla. Sounds interesting? but is it?

The box looks groovy: a big gangster is smoking a big Havana cigar. The installation is about 500MB, but transferring all the files onto my hard drive was about as fast as the rotting process of your average blue whale. The rather average introductory movie showed how my father was killed in cold blood. I then proceeded to starting the tutorial, getting the movements right. A tough gangster voice ? good voice-acting this one, wouldn?t seem out of place in a Godfather movie ? explained to me how to control gangsters ? you can recruit up to seven of these. Then he informed me how to start a business, be it legit or illegitimate. After the tutorial, it was up to me? My first assignment was to liquidate the three gang members who had ?offed? my father. Are you ready Sonny?

The graphics of Gangsters 2 are below standard. You see the city where you operate in from an isometric point of view. There shouldn?t be anything wrong with this? if it weren?t for the fact that everything?s zoomed in too closely and you can?t zoom out! That makes it hard to get an overall view of the game ? though you can follow all actions and give the commands on a drawn map of the city. So I was clicking on a set of squares with icons, meaning the game quickly amounted to the green dots (me) shooting the yellow dots (rivalling gangs). You can eliminate other gangsters by simply shooting them, performing a drive-by shooting, or blowing up the building they?re in. And most assignments in Gangsters 2 don?t amount to much more than this: eliminating rivals and blowing up/sabotaging buildings. The game is 100% linear and goes through several episodes. Now I don?t mind a game being linear ? check out my review of the excellent strategy game ?Desperados? ? and if the different assignments had possessed some degree of variation, I wouldn?t have minded it here either, but now Gangsters 2 just leads to boredom and frustration.
The economical engine behind the game ? starting legal and illegal businesses ? lacks depth, and hardly has any entertainment value. It really didn?t take me long to get bored with the flashing bitmaps and green and yellow dots on the map. The makers probably tried to make Gangsters 2 easier to control than the original, but they cut down on the different options and thus made the game a little too simplistic. There are also a lot of dead moments in the game ? I remember waiting for fifteen minutes (real time) for a gangster I had to kill to walk out of a building to go to the local brothel. And because the economic part of the game has limited options, I didn?t have all that much to do in the meantime.

Your buildings are constantly in danger ? after all you?re not the only one who can get his hands on explosives. That?s why you can have buildings (and persons) guarded by gangsters and/or the so called ?muscle? (read: bodyguards). They patrol and shoot at anything that has even a hint of rivalry. What I missed what the lack of interaction in the fights: my gangsters were just shooting away and all I could do was pray that my guys didn?t drop dead, but those across the street did. If your main character is shot, it?s game over, so the dangerous assignments are best left to other gangsters.

Gangsters 2 can be played alone, but also has a multiplayer option where you can compete against human gangster-wannabes. But all in all this isn?t much more fun than the single player game.

I can be brief about the sound (though I won?t): it?s bad for your hearing. It often happens that the voice of your counsellor is incomprehensible because your gang members have opened fire on a rivalling gang. The music is nothing to write home about, and the effects of the everyday city life are an infernal noise that drowns out everything else.

All in all I?d say Gangsters 2 is a missed opportunity. The setting sounded promising ? as it should have been ? but there were just too many cuts in the original. All that?s left is a way too limited game that is quickly reduced to sending green dots after yellow dots?