the morally slimy principles by which you run a ruthless drug empire), but at this early stage of development, you only have a few hours until the frustrations start creeping in.įor a game about massive-scale criminal enterprise, there's an awful lot of micromanagement, and it's a struggle to get business flowing. So all the right principles are here (i.e. Fail to retain your lieutenants' loyalty, and you may find yourself put in the difficult position of having to knock them off your payroll with a bullet to the head.

They'll come to you with demands, too, such as pay rises, promotions and quests. Lieutenants are hired to carry out special tasks like robberies, assassinations, transporting money and taking over enemy buildings. There's not enough personality or dialogue variety yet to really invest you in these characters like you would in, say, Crusader Kings, but that's the kind of thing that you'd hope will get added throughout Early Access. When this inevitably happens, you take control of one of your lieutenants, which creates a satisfying sense of continuity to your drug lord dynasty. Your character can die in much the same way-through a police sting or at the hands of a rival boss who takes exception to you usurping their coca farms. The ease with which I dispatched him-a simple order for my in-house assassin Vanessa Diaz Venji-was a lesson that death comes easily in this cruel world. At one point in the campaign, I was faced with the choice to pay back the money provided to me by my benefactor at the start of the game, or arrange for him to be killed. There's a bit of narrative thrust here too, with some good writing and character portraits giving dialogue interactions and story points some liveliness.

There are already a few nice touches like this that help evoke that fantasy of becoming your own little Pablo Escobar. At one point, I got the priest at one of my churches to mention my name in a sermon, boosting my reputation among the regular folk. You do this by building taxi companies, churches, casinos and other fronts in cities, which will grant you some bonuses too. Once that money starts pouring in, you'll need to launder it.

Bring back dopewars