A new DLC, ‘Serious Business’, has been released by Kalypso Media for Omerta – City Of Gangsters, and is available for download now. The update can be downloaded from Xbox Live.

This new DLC will provide players with two additional maps, which can be utilized for both multiplayer mode and in customizable sandbox games. Additionally, several new features have been added, including a rival gang in single player mode, newer and more varied difficulty settings, additional options regarding the construction of buildings, the ability to travel by car, and tweaks in terms of balancing.

In addition to the added features, Serious Business will also provide Omerta – City Of Gangsters with several general game play updates based on gamer feedback.

Omerta: City Of Gangsters is a simulation game, originally released in 2013 by developers Haemimont Games and publishers Kalypso Media across Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, and Xbox 360. Check out the Serious Business update today.

On the surface Omerta can be overlooked with simple game mechanics that make up the same type of Sim games. However, by the time you finish your first mission you can start to see that there is a lot of well thought out depth to the scenarios. The easiest way to make money is to create a speakeasy to sell beer and wine, but it’s not as easy as renting a building and then establishing it. You need to think about supplying as well.

You can either rely on outside suppliers or you can take them over either by raiding them, or using a drive by shooting to make them flee their establishment. Raiding can make the owner upset if he stays and if you do a drive by you bring up your Fear rating, a rating that judges how much the community is afraid of you, and it can also bring the police down on you. Once the police have had enough they launch an investigation and you can either try to bribe them, blame it on someone else, or try to destroy the evidence. Bribing costs money, blaming brings down your Like factors, and destroying evidence becomes a combat mission where if you lose, could cost you some of your henchmen. See, I told you it becomes in depth. And all you wanted to do was open a speakeasy.

The truth is, if the depth wasn’t there, you could easily blow through some of these missions and not even care about the story, but every layer of game play really drives you in and before you know it you’re completely hooked on Omerta. The combat system isn’t all too spectacular though. At times it feels a little tacked on, and can sometimes slow down the pace of the game and story.

In combat, much like X-Com your henchmen can only move a certain amount and still be able to shoot or melee. Melee can be more accurate than shooting, however you have to be one space away from your enemy in order to engage and usually if you don’t take them down during your turn you have to stand in front of them and hope they don’t kill you. Shooting is safer and you can hide behind objects for better coverage and although it may take longer to kill your enemy because you miss more, it’s still the preferred route. In fact one character, who is handy with the knife, is easier to use when you only throw his knife instead of engage in close quarter combat.

Each mission progresses the story, as well as the depth to game play. In the first few missions you only have to worry about making money. Later on you have to also handle taking on tasks for crime lords which can’t be done without still making money. Making seven thousand dollars in a mission seems hard but you also can go to the main map and accept offers from characters to buy or sell products. Some characters offer other services like bringing up your Like or Fear, or some might need a loan or can help with laundering. Later missions also require cleaning the money.

Although every action can be completed using dirty money, I found that clean money works just as well, but there’s no hint to let you know. In fact there are a lot of things in the game that just seemed implied. There’s a time of day system with night and day effects, however there isn’t a clock or calendar to be specific. When a mission requires you to lose the heat in seven days, you really have no idea how long that is.

There’s also no clear breakdown of your expenses. As the game progresses you have to pay your henchmen, the rent on buildings, and other commodities and all you get is a bar at the bottom of the screen to tell you basic numbers such as dirty money, clean money, storage, beer, liquor, like, fear and heat. In order to get stats on how much a certain location is operating you have to click on that particular building. It can show the stats of efficiency, how much is sold, and you have options to upgrade. But there still isn’t a place to look at a breakdown of all establishments operating and how they all stack up.

For the same matter it is also hard to navigate around the screen. I was never introduced to rotating the camera and for the first few missions I stuck with the default camera. This made combat missions hard when the enemy would hide behind an object. Once I found that you could rotate the camera the game play became much easier although there wasn’t a way to go back to default nor could you snap the camera angles. On the town map you can also rotate the camera, but to navigate around the map you have to move your curser to the edges of the screen. This makes it difficult if you only want to mouse over the bottom bar to get a better description of your numbers and the map just keeps scrolling down. It would have been nice to have the option to click and grab the map to move it instead.

Everything else for this game was pretty much done well. Characters are well voice acted, even though some of their lines can be repetitive. The art is also done well, even if most of the times you will have to zoom all the way out to see as much of the map as possible. When you put a task to a henchman, you can select the character and zoom in to see them running down the street. The overall story is pretty engaging, even if slightly predictable. Name another Sim game with a compelling story let alone a story at all though.

Omerta – City of Gangsters will certainly keep you entertained for quite some time. It’s one of those games that on the surface look pretty simple, but it will certainly suck you in. The game play is solid and in depth but doesn’t let you peek under the hood to help micro manage. The combat system changes up the style and is engaging as well but can be auto played at times if it isn’t your cup of tea. If you’re into Sim games, you might want to give this one a try, and if you’re not you can still have some fun.

This game was reviewed on the PC.

Players will take control of an immigrant fresh off the boat in the 1920’s who works his way up the criminal hierarchy in the bad, bad town of Atlantic City. By taking up jobs and recruiting various gang members, players can eventually reach the role of the Boss and call the shots. That is, if they don’t get whacked first.

Combat will be turn-based and involve as much stealth as pointing and shooting, so make sure to use your team members wisely in order to defeat your enemies and come out on top.

Omerta: City of Gangsters is set to release on February 1st in the UK for PC and home consoles.

Like the different Mafia Wars games, Omerta allows players to create a profile online and run roughshod over the world on their way to becoming the top gangster. Those who log on to Omerta can use a voucher code printed on a flyer from the boxed retail version of Omerta: City of Gangsters. Once the player reaches Associate level, he’ll be eligible for various prizes.

Omerta Game Ltd CEO Steve Biddick commented on the partnership, stating, “When I heard about Kalypso’s project Omerta: City of Gangsters I was naturally very excited to know more. It is great to be associated with such a prestigious and inventive games developer and everyone at Omerta is looking forwards to seeing the finished product!

“We have been publishing and refining Omerta for 10 years and over 4.7 million players have enjoyed our game. Omerta: City of Gangsters is an awesome game! Our players will love it! Omerta and Omerta: City of Gangsters are highly complementary games and we look forward to a long-playing cooperation between the two companies.”

Omerta: City of Gangsters will release on February 1st in the UK for PC and consoles.

However, just recently, Kalypso also announced that Omerta will be making its way to Mac systems in early 2013. Omerta is still slated for Xbox 360 and PC release on February 1st. Check out the new trailer they’ve releases specifically promoting the Mac announcement.

Omerta mixes tactical combat and conquest-style gameplay, and will feature cross-platform multiplayer play between PC and Mac. You can even start and stop games, and leave off from where you started with full support for Steam Cloud Saves on both platforms.

Now if only we had the equivalent of Gosling in this game. Life would still be tough but oh so complete.

Some of the key features of the combat include destructible environments, dynamic fog of war, weapons with various area effects, combat status ailments like panic, bleeding, crippled, etc., some intelligent AI that will utilize all of the above to take you down (and destroy your cover while they’re at it, because hey, screw you copper/robber).

Developed by Haemimont Games, Omerta: City of Gangsters is set in Prohibition-era Atlantic City. And if Boardwalk Empire has taught us anything about the era, it’s everything goes. You’l lbe pulling off elaborate heists, drive-bys, gang violence and much more when the game releases for Xbox 360 and PC in 2013.

Life is all about choices. When I got off the tube in the capital, I could have walked left instead of right and I may have never reached my destination. The London locals didn’t want to talk to a foreigner from the Middle East (read East Midlands) and I had to trust my gut. I got lucky. In Haemimont Games new gangster epic you will be faced with a lot of choice, so I will ask you a question, do you feel lucky?

Down a side street was my destination, a detective agency , tucked away to avoid attention from the liquor police, “Tommy ‘Two Gun’ Tucci sent me” I said meekly to the man on the door, “Oh, hi!” he said politely, “we are just setting up if you want to get a coffee”, so I politely accepted and went to go in. The thing is, he meant a coffee in a coffee shop. I felt like a tool.

So after my reasonably priced coffee (I was expecting the price to destroy my soul) I headed back to look at Omerta the period, gangster sim. This time the door was closed, so I used the buzzer. “Who sent you?” said the raspy voice on the other side, “Tommy ‘Two Gun’ Tucci”, I replied. The door unlocked and I made my way down the narrow staircase ahead. At the bottom I was met my a lone man sat at a desk.

He was wearing period clothes and on his desk sat an antique typewriter, not unlike the ones in Resident Evil, and the ashtray on his desk contained the ends of countless used cigars. The room itself was minute and I was starting to doubt myself, then suddenly he stood up and made his way to the large bookcase bulit into the wall. He moved a book and the whole bookcase rotated, revealing a rather expansive bar, and beyond were countless gaming laptops. What an introduction.

Atlantic City in all its isometric glory.

Omerta is the story of two brothers from Sicily, who moved to Atlantic City in America during the prohibition in the1920’s. One brother sees the prohibition as a chance to make himself a better life and the other chooses to enforce the law. You will never guess which brother you play as. The word Omerta is a code of honour, preventing people from within criminal syndicates divulging trade secrets. Gangsters don’t take well to snitches.

The game is a mix between Sim City and XCOM, but in a universe similar to the one seen in tv series Boardwalk Empire, which is no bad thing. From what I saw, it lacks the depth of either of the aforementioned games, but that is to expected as they are much more focused affairs. That is not to say the game isn’t deep though. At the heart of the game you are building up an empire, you can play the build section of the game relatively cleanly: bribing officials, trading, building alliances with rival gangs, building legitimate businesses. Or the opposite: killing officials, stealing everything, killing rivals, building illegal distilleries.

For any action to be completed, you must either go personally or send one of your hired goons to do the dirty work, and when you are all assigned tasks there is nothing to do but sit and wait. Hopefully they add the ability to speed up time for the finished build of the game, although this may be alleviated slightly when you have a bigger mob later in the game as I only played an early section. In the story mode you get a set of objectives to complete, one of the first is to build up a set amount of money by stealing/trading, but every now and then a random event will occur and battle will commence.

The camera zooms in for the combat, which is turn based. Your avatar and mobsters all have character specific skills, and as is the trend these days you can also assign perks which improve your proficiency with a desired weapon, amongst other things. Weapons also have unique skills: a shotgun gives you a cone target which can injure multiple enemies, a Tommy-gun is spray-and-pray and damages the enemies morale, pistols fire more in a turn and can target a specific area, and double revolvers let you fire first if attacked.

The turns are based on character statistics, so you don’t take it in turns by team, and a character won’t necessarily get only one turn per round. This leads to frantic prioritising of targets, trying to end them before they get their turn. You can use cover to your advantage, but unfortunately the combat zones seem pretty flat, and don’t seem to take advantage of verticality.

The combat is probably the highlight from what I saw, the only downside is that there are no rogue-like elements, like perma-death. If your characters die in battle, you currently just have to wait in the build mode until they are fit for duty again. One nice touch though is if your characters are arrested you have a few choices: you can be boring and bribe police, you can wait, or you can launch a full-scale assault against the station to destroy evidence. I choose option three.

There are some nice little aesthetic touches in the game, people getting out their umbrellas in the rain, the city itself featuring known landmarks from the time. Graphically the game is pretty simplistic, which suits the game really as the user interface is kept free from clutter, some dynamic camera angles in the battles would have helped with immersion though.

You can hit people with bats to inflict concussion, which affects the amount of action they can take.

Unfortunately I didn’t get to try out the two online modes, as they sound pretty promising. You can take your mob from the main game and pit them against your friends, or strangers, and keep the spoils of victory. You can also team up with your friends in some of the co-operative modes. These, along with the sandbox option, should provide longevity well after the main campaign is finished.

Haemimont Games sure know how to make a strategy title, they make the brilliant dictator-em-up Tropico series after all. From my time with the game it looks very promising, it’s hard to get the full picture though in a couple of hours, with a game this gargantuan in scale. Any fans of the strategy genre should definitely keep an eye on this. Ever since I remember, I always wanted to be a gangster. Now I can.

About Omerta – City of Gangsters :

Game Overview :
Omerta – City of Gangsters is a simulation game with tactical turn-based combat. Taking the role of a fresh-from-the-boat immigrant, with dreams of the big life, the player will work his way up the criminal hierarchy of 1920’s Atlantic City. Starting with small jobs, his character recruits a gang and expands his empire by taking territory from other gangsters. Eventually he establishes his own crime syndicate and becomes the de facto ruler of Atlantic City.

Publisher : Kalypso Media

Developer : Haemimont Games

Platforms : PC and X360

Release Date : 9/11/2012

Stay tuned to Gamingbolt.com for more news and updates.

In Omerta – City of Gangsters, you can build a criminal empire in Prohibition-era Atlantic City by running guns, taking over competing businesses, pulling bank heists, opening illicit businesses and stuff – according to Kalypso of course. And it’s something that has an interesting premise, when you think about it.

It features realistic turn-based tactical combat and will be released this autumn for the PC and Xbox 360. No mention of PS3 version yet, but it could be on the cards later.

The player strategically manages his business and his minions in a real-time format, slowly but steadily increasing his influence over the city. The player sends his henchmen out on missions ranging from assassinating an informant, to raiding a warehouse, springing a friend from prison, robbing a bank or attacking a rival gang’s hideout. Nobody is above the law in Atlantic City, so it always helps to have a little cash handy to bribe a policeman or pay off a politician.

Doesn’t it wan’t to make you play with that description? Check out the trailer below.

Kalypso’s line-up thus far for Gamescom 2012 includes:

Legends of Pegasus (PC)
The Dark Eye: Demonicon (PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and PC)
Dark (PC and Xbox 360)
Omerta: City of Gangsters (PC and Xbox 360)
Port Royale 3 (Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3)
Alien Spidy (PSN, Xbox Live and PC)
Dollar Dash (PSN, Xbox Live and PC)

Of these titles, Omerta: City of Gangsters and The Dark Eye: Demonicon will be playable via consoles and PC during the Con.

They may sound relatively unknown but Kalypso has been behind quite a number of titles since it’s inception in 2006, either as publisher or developer.

These include Tropic 3 & 4, Sins of a Solar Empire, Theater of War, Disciples III, The First Templar, Boulder Dash XL, Galactic Civilizations and much much more.

It’ll be interesting to see what they unveil at this year’s Gamescom.