Inside Omerta: City of Gangsters Prohibition-violence back in style for XCOM-meets-Boardwalk Empire.

It’s peachy that the classic age of gangsters is back in the pink.

One of the cultural gifts given to us by Boardwalk Empire has been the rehabilitation of Prohibition-era cool, that easy quality of jazz-age style that’s been, for too long, moldering in the attic, superseded by later eras of gangster-chic.

Who wouldn't love to dress up like Nucky Thompson, step into a saloon bursting with flappers, roar through the streets of Atlantic City in a rattling Cadillac or enjoy trading some top-grade junk with a murderous smoothy like Arnold Rothstein? 1920s murder-robbery-corruption is back.

Elsewhere in the world of things-that-are-fashionable-again, but ostensibly some distance from speakeasies and ‘swell dames’ - turn-based strategy of the XCOM-ilk, in which players take top-down strategic and economic management of a system and fight tactical team-based combat scenarios therein.  And that’s the basis for Omerta: City of Gangsters.

Gabriel Dobrev, boss of the game’s developer Haemimont Games says, “As you can imagine, when we started doing the game some time ago, we had no idea that XCOM was coming. We wanted to create a game that appeals more to an audience that was familiar with classic games of the past, that can appreciate the level of complexity and depth that turn-based combat provides.”

Haemimont is no stranger to strategy games. The company is best known for its Tropico series of island-dictatorship games, the most recent of which, Tropico 4, reviewed decently on IGN, scoring an 8.5 for its “complex and rewarding” offering.

Players in Omerta take the role of a mob-boss in Atlantic City, making the moves that will eliminate rivals, expand business and generally accrue power. Squads of goons are sent off to do bad things to people, and here’s where the more detailed tactical stuff comes into play, with different characters and weapons offering a variety of advantages and drawbacks in any given situation.

Dobrev says, “There's a lot of puzzle-solving variety when you're playing turn-based combat. There are so many ways to get to the same end, and so many options to disable your opponents, improve your people, try different targets, try different abilities. The depth in all these choices and role-playing with them is what builds the gameplay in the combat aspect.”

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As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster.

But why, of all the possible combat scenarios in the world, pick the era of Tommy-guns and baseball bats, the days of hooch and hoodlums?

He says, “There was an explosion of opportunities during that time. A lot of newcomers entered influential circles, because there was so much money to be made [from illegal liquor].” The early-years of mafia activity in the U.S was also the basis for classic action-shooter Mafia (2002) which spawned a sequel, set in a later period.

Those roaring-’20s have inspired plenty of fiction from which the designers can take inspiration, including HBO’s Boardwalk Empire and Once Upon a Time in America, both of which Dobrev cites as major influences. Also, gangsters of later eras fetishized the 1920s as a golden age of violent criminality and corruption and this plays out in movies set in later periods like The Godfather and Goodfellas.

Dobrev says, “Part of the reason is very much spelled, again, in the very beginning of Goodfellas. Being a gangster puts you in a position where you can easily consider yourself a lot more worthy compared to the other people around you.”

Famously, the opening dialog in that movie, from central character Henry Hill is, “As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster.”

“That's how Goodfellas starts," says Dobrev. "It's one of the things that we held as a mark of exactly what we're trying to do and why these people get to that opportunity. They don't have much of a choice. They don't really have any other options for a reasonable life. So they end up doing this and it feels great. This is the only thing that they can do well.”

Colin Campbell interviews and writes about games pretty much every weekday. For updates and commentary, follow on Twitter or at IGN.

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