I really enjoyed this game - graphics, sounds and style are excellent. I think the makers really captured the atmosphere they were aiming for.
This is a managment type game and as such it's quite simplistic. This is not bad, but if you do another type of this game it would be cool to see more type of venues and more options/variables that can affect the outcome.
There are two variables that never seemed to come into play for me:
1) I never ran into trouble with the police for instance, I kept their respect though and the lowest (other than at the start) was 70%. It just seemed odd that it didn't matter,
2) while the other families kept attacking me even though I had bribed them all the way to 0% animosity. This annoyed me to no end, but I suppose it would have been to easy otherwise. It just seems like bribing the families is completely unnecessary. However I don't know if they would have attacked more if I didn't bribe them?
The only major fault I found was with mobster growth. It worked fine while you were in your own borough, but it came to a halt as I expanded. I bought my second borough so I didn't lose any prestige, but I didn't see any real growth. Then I started getting attacked and as such I took over the next district by force, bribed everyone so my prestige was intact. I thought if I didn't do anything for the next couple of days I would get some more mobsters, but I kept getting attacked and losing districts and my mobsters were getting killed so in the end I just had 12 or 11 mobsters per district.
It worked fine I suppose and maybe it's part of the game that you don't see much growth when the gang wars start? I owned the city on day 47 btw. Not sure if it would have made a difference if I went slower?
