Omerta is, according to Wikipedia, a popular cultural attitude and code of honour that places heavy importance on a deep-rooted ‘code of silence’, non-cooperation with authorities, and non-interference in the illegal (and legal) actions of others. So, if you’re a gangster, and see another gangster do something terrible, you are not meant to say anything to the authorities. A similar thing exists in the game development world, where game developers aren’t supposed to be critical of other games. Of course, this gets broken all the time, and I’m about to break it again.

Because the game, Omerta: City of Gangsters, is the sum of all my fears with recent developments in video games. It takes all the crap iPhone / Facebook game ‘features’ and puts it into a full priced packaged retail box, and expects people to be ok with this. Well, I’m sorry, it’s not ok. Not in the slightest. Thankfully it doesn’t do the ultimate sin of iPhone / Facebook and charge for the ‘privilege’ of playing piecemeal, but the mechanics are the same.

Let me explain. Omerta teases you into thinking it is a strategy game. It has a small city map, representative of a neighbourhood in Atlantic City circa 1920, populated with little people walking about, with large icons scattered across it. You have a headquarters, and you have a bunch of goons to do things for you. In the first level of the game you have to establish a Speakeasy, in order to sell illegal alcohol to make some money for your empire. So you click the icon for “joint” and send your little dude out. It’s cool you can watch him actually do this. Then you wait, and the icon changes and a pop up tells you it’s now yours. Then you’ve got to click again and select a Speakeasy. And wait. Once this is done, your “dirty money” value increases slowly. The next task is to set up a brewery to supply to Speakeasy. So you select a goon, click on the icon, wait, click, wait, click, wait, and then click OK when it pops up finished. Rinse and Repeat.

Later, you’ve got to earn “clean money”. Yes, another different currency which can be exchanged for the first currency, usually at a loss, and accompanied with a period of waiting. But the process of setting up places to earn this second currency is exactly the same. Click, wait, wait, click. You can upgrade all the buildings you own by spending cash (either dirty or clean) and luckily here you don’t have to wait, but given the interface here I suspect this wait period was taken out.

Anyone familiar with the ‘Ville type of games will recognise these mechanics, and maybe that’s what the people behind Omerta wanted – an accessible strategy game for all audiences. But it makes absolutely no sense on the Xbox platform. We’ve got some really good quality strategy games on the xbox, and no one, absolutely no one, is crying out for Farmville on the console. Hell, if you absolutely need to play this type of game with a controller, there’s an inbuilt browser so there’s no reason to buy Omerta.

If there is one redeeming feature it’s the combat sections. Even though here they’ve completely ripped off Fallout 1 & 2, by assigning Stats to characters which determine initiative, Action(AP) and Movement(AP) points, and even the types of weapons and perks for characters, it’s still a fun system after all these years. If you haven’t played Fallout 1, it’s a top-down hex-based ‘dice’ system. The computer rolls dice and adds your player stats to see when you can move, how far you can move, if you can see an enemy, if you can hit an enemy, and how much damage you do to that enemy. Omerta removes the grid system, but else it’s pretty much exactly the same. And it’s fun, and to be fair the designers have tried to shake things up with missions now and then, like with the boxing missions where you can’t use weapons apart from fist weapons. But they do get repetitive really quick.

Although the world you play in looks ok, there’s nothing exceedingly impressive from one level to the next, and it all rather looks the same. This criticism applies to both the various neighbourhood screens and the combat sections. In the Neighbourhood screens, the icons on the main world view aren’t distinctive enough, so it’s easy to not be able to find various places you may need to. For example, it may tell you to upgrade a hotel, so you zip about the map looking for it and often can’t find the icon. The minimap is hopeless and is useless for navigation. There are coloured dots indicating if a place is yours or not, but it’s cluttered and some are different sizes without having a reason for the size difference.

Being set in the 1920s the sound track is groovy gangster jazz, and the voices are all typical ethnic “wise guys” and “slapper girls”. But the music and sound suffered from a terrible skipping. I can only hope this is due to a dodgy review copy CD pressing and not actually in the final game, as there still hasn’t been an update for it and it is incredibly distracting.
There is multiplayer and co-operative, but I never once got past the “looking for games” screen. Again, I can’t be sure if this is an issue because I have a review copy, or if it’s simply broken. I suspect the latter because it didn’t even tell me “sorry, no games found” – just sat on the search screen until I exited it.

Conclusion:
If Omerta had a persistent world in single player, rather than neighbourhoods which you played then left never to have an impact on you again, or more in depth strategy system when it came to earning money and resources, action cut scenes rather than stills, ok, so it still wouldn’t be the greatest game ever, but it would have been worth spending time with.

After playing two or three levels though, I knew I had seen all I had to see and simply persisted because of the review. Which is sad, because I really wanted to like Omerta. It’s a great idea by a small company and given the climate of games development at the moment it’s precisely the sort of thing we should be supporting. But by choosing to develop the game in this simplistic, “accessible” way, they’ve probably alienated the very people who would support a game like this.

Pros:
Cool battle mechanics (even if they are completely copied from Fallout)

Cons:
Boring mission structure
Overly simplistic strategy based on facebook waiting games
Confusing icons and maps
Stuttering audio
Online functionality never worked

55/100