Omerta – City Of Gangster, Game Review

Omerta – City Of Gangster, Game Review

Who doesn’t dream about being involved with the Mafia in the good old times, running a city with your iron hand and controlling everything? I always wanted to play a good Mafia game after 2K released Mafia, sure Mafia II came along, but was not as good as the first one. You can imagine that I was really excited when Omerta came along.

The goal is to become the greatest Mafia leader and build magnificent empire. You have a city map where you pick your quest to start conquer different parts of the city. Sadly, whatever you build up in your earlier quest, it’s not transferred to your next one, not even your “like” or “fear”, this would give a better feeling that everything is connected.  To be liked or feared give you different advantages and disadvantages.

The City View

What did I think about the game? Lets start with the good things… The aesthetics in the game looks really nice, you get sucked right into it and you feel that you are being part of this world. You can zoom in really close to the street level and see people walking and driving around, really neat. The music fits the game very well; if you play it for a while it gets easily repetitive. The voice acting is of really good quality and the voices felt well fitting and I was only aware of one small mistake with the voice when compering to the quest outline.  

When picking a new quest

That’s the good things and now to the things that is not as good… The battle system is a turn-based, where you have three different kinds of character’s; melee, medium range and long range. What the computer / AI does is that it gets close to you no matter what weapon or skills they are using, there is no real brain within the AI.

When you are in your city and picking a location to do something with, I would love to see an indication that you will start a battle or if it’s solved over with only one of your guys. Some times you are waiting to start a battle and the guy you assigned solves it by himself and sometimes you are in a battle. It gets annoying when you had a fight earlier and half of your team is injured and then you end up in a fight without knowing it. When you pick a fight in the multi storage building, you can end up fighting in a warehouse, logic?

Picture of how one battle could look like

The battle system is tricky to get a long with, you have to play by their rules and a miss click can easily cost one of your men his life. To take cover is a delicate sport, sometimes you get a hang of it and then it suddenly doesn’t work, no real cohesion and easy to miss click. 

When you are running around and start ruling the city, no one is stopping you, there is no other Mafia family who is competing with you. Time is the only factor that is in your way and the game would benefit from having other Mafia families coming and making your life difficult, of course you should be able to deal with it in any mean necessary.

It’s a shame that you can’t have a bit fun, for example being able to take over different buildings and make it into your business, not only the once the game deliberated already decided on picking. How awesome wouldn’t it be to take over a church and make it into a fighting club or a hospital into a brewery!

A neat loading screen

Every quest takes some times to finish, everything from 20-50min and you can’t save in the middle of it and if you die, gods forbid, you have to play the quest from the beginning, a really motivation killer.

It’s great to see that they try, but they are not getting far.