I've put about a billion hours into this on Steam, and, before that, on CD, and despite having some serious flaws, I'd say the actual combat is some of the best you'll find in a turn based tactical anywhere - the sheer destructability of the environment is, as far as I'm aware, completely unmatched in any other TBT out there. "Unmatched" is probably a good word to describe these games. While other TBT games do a lot of things better, nothing comes close to doing some of the stuff SS does as well as it does. The store page sums up the game well enough, so here's a quick list of the exceptionally good and the annoyingly bad. Good: -The physics are great. No other TBT does them this well. Bullets are stopped by or pass through cover logically, hits are calculated by simulated trajectory (so you can totally kill people with ricochets, etc.) -The game has a hidden hotseat multiplayer function that is a ton of fun. -You actually can engage in a ton of different approaches. Lets say you need to kill some snipey dude. You can suppress him and flank, counter snipe, riddle the entire room with machinegun fire and hope to hit him, or collapse roof/floor/entire building. Cons: -The actual coding isn't always great. While the actual enemy AI is pretty on par for the era the games came out, you'll find you and your opponents occasionally glitch and empty a mag into the floor while trying to shoot someone. - Similarly, LOS can be wonky. You will empty a mag into a little bump in the dirt that only blocks your muzzle. -There is a level in one of the games (can't remember which) that is essentially broken and is nearly impossible to beat without cheats. -The level up system doesn't work correctly. It's not vital. -It's a little too easy to win many fights by riddling things with machinegun fire, which is hard to resist on your Nth playthrough when you have a good idea where enemies spawn and know you'll catch a bullet if you actually open the door instead of shooting it.
Do you want to run a city as a crime boss in an open, free-form crime sim? Enjoy firebombing the competition, intimidating business owners, and put the hit out on your rivals? Relish the satisfaction of successfully spending a few hours getting a game from two decades ago to work on modern systems? Gangsters is, fundamentally, a great, seemingly overlooked classic of management gaming. The gameplay itself is sort of a crime-themed strategy game - you recruit and outfit gangsters, set them to various tasks (both mundane, such as making the weekly collections, and more thrilling, such as drive by machinegunning), and manage quite a bit of other minutae related to running an empire. Much of this is done through a sort of strategic turn phase, presented as you reading the paper and issuing orders from your office, but once the plans have been set into place, they are executed in real time. This gives the game a much less abstracted feel compared to a lot of management games. It's a tremendously fun game, and while watching a building's windows blow out in low-res splendour isn't quite as thrilling or impressive as it was 20 years ago, it's still *fun*. As is obvious, however, it may not work very well on your computer. I had the fortune of getting it up and running in about ten minutes (there's a thread with a patch and a regedit note in the forum which got it started. Fixing a missing text issue was then as easy as running in XP SP2 compatibility mode, and my mouse stutter was solved by disabling my Nvidia card in favor of whatever onboard graphics setup intel provided. Now it runs perfectly. You might not have as easy of a time. For me, it was worth $8 to take the risk, and I've always liked the game enough to not mind what I was expecting to be a sizable time investment to get something working.
