Empire of Sin
Might contain spoilers.
A very enjoyable game much like the excellent XCOM 2 in its battle system. It’s fun to take over the city neighbourhood by neighbourhood, upgrading everything, seeing influence and income grow together. I never did understand what a good strategy might be for the composition of a neighbourhood, so I made arbitrary decisions based on what I saw in the moment and upgraded everything I built in a single neighbourhood simultaneously.
I found the UI a bit frustrating outside battles: it takes several attempts to target the right team member for an action. It’s also annoyingly inconsistent about your team following you into or out of a building. I spent a fair bit of time moving back and forth and waiting for my team to catch up, worrying all the while that they might trigger a fight on the way.
It’s challenging to properly utilize squads once they grow to five or six members (the limit being eight). Half of them will inevitably spend their first turns moving into position while the other half kill enemies, requiring the first half to move again while the others kill enemies, ad nauseum.
Empire of Sin unfortunately has the usual boring endgame. Eliminating two rival factions was enough to tip the balance of power decidedly in my favour, but it took a long time to move through the map and clean up the others even though I had clearly ‘won’ long ago. As I had completed whatever there was of the story, I didn’t bother sticking with it once it was down to two rival factions.
IGDB has an interesting notion of how long ago the game was released:
