City of Gangsters

honestly, I bought this game awhile ago and it sat in the library for a while. That 92 hours are all mostly from the last 2-3 months. It a game I always come back to, and would say full price is fair, and a discount is perfect to get in.
Other comments have mentioned, and yes there is fairly little gangstering, it is an in-depth resource management and logistics game with a gangster theme. The feeling of it is always great. It has tons of features which all interact with each other making it complex enough to really get into, but also calm enough to causally play.
I will say map generation does have a major effect, and seeing one game isn't going to work at all is natural. But when you get a playable map, it becomes extremely fun! Please buy it so I don't feel crazy playing it as much as I do.

Expected a game about gangsters fighting for territories in a city. Turned out to be a game about a city that happens to have some gang territories in it. For an organized crime game, I reckon it's more about organize and less about crime. At $30 I say not worth it. If you can get it for $20 or less then it's worth a look. Didn't see any bugs so there's that. 5/10.

The early gameplay loop is really satisfying - building up your operation from scratch and selling that first batch of prohibited liquor really scratches that empire building itch in all the right places, as does getting new buildings and methods of earning money. I also really like the idea of building up a network of favours and relationships, although i felt that it could have been better - right now you simply interact with a certain individual a handful of times to extract all of the information / connections you can before they fade into obscurity as your territorial borders move further away from them. This means that core business partners you formed a close bond with end up as little more than cash registers as the game progresses, which is a shame.
The cities design and their effect on gameplay is interesting, but could be further improved - right now maps are procedurally generated, with business types appearing randomly: which is why many guides out there recommend restarting a game if the randomly generated resources aren't suitable for your starting business. This sort of ruins the immersion and makes it more of a 4X, which takes away from the concrete, 1920s context that the game is trying to build. Rather than having individual buildings tied to a random resource (or disappointingly, nothing at all), i would have preferred if cities were split into zones or clusters of buildings that offer some basic supplies needed for lower tier operations, but are distinct from each other through specialisations.
Overall, a really stellar effort to introduce mechanics (favours, bribery, relationships) that you don't usually see in other similar strategy games, with a solid early game that really pulls you in to the experience of being a gangster in the prohibition era.

its a good game. interesting idea, but lack of challenges or gameplay variety.

So So
(This is a neutral recommendation.)
City of Gangsters has a good premise, and it's initially challenging and fun to slowly expand your operation. But once you're solidly established, you're left with nothing but annoying, repetitive chores to do.
The game's first problem is that the tutorial is a bit too long. If you don't like the way things are heading, it might be better to not even finish it, otherwise you may lose your refund window. But if you like what you're seeing, it's OK.
After that -- once you realize the tutorial is over (the game doesn't really tell you it is, it just keeps going) and decide to start a new game to do things your way -- you'll have a hard time getting a decent starting condition. If you don't start off with an initial business that produces a raw material necessary for one of the basic boozes, you're screwed. And you also need a bunch of nearby sources of whatever else is required to produce your first hooch. So, you have to keep restarting your game over and over until those conditions are met. I must have spent one whole hour doing that, before I could actually play.
Once you manage to get going, you'll spend a fairly long while delivering your merchandise personally to your customers, exploring nearby "Corners" (the game's nodes), slowly building up favor with nearby business owners, creating new Fronts and expanding your territory. You'll be constantly short on cash as you start recruiting some new people to your crew to manage your illegal businesses, learn new skills, fulfill your neighbors' requests and bribe cops patrolling your area of influence.
Eventually, you'll learn how and successfully build one or more Gambling Dens. The protection money you charge from businesses in your area will start generating some relevant income. You'll establish your first automatic delivery route and won't have to spend all your time manually buying and selling stuff all over your corner of the city.
Getting to the point where you finally stop struggling is quite fun. But once you have plenty of money to spare, the game becomes boring.
There isn't much to do with money. You want to buy a Delivery Truck with decent capacity to make one of your delivery routes more efficient? Well... you can't. You only get those from fulfilling quests, and they hardly ever show up as a reward (after more than 20 hours playing, I managed to acquire 2 of those). You want to buy a new business? Why? You are already rich, you don't need more money, and there's also a much easier and cheap way to acquire those. But even then you don't feel like going through all the trouble required to set a new operation up and running -- that's a lot of work just for... money, which you don't need.
Expanding your territory is really annoying, because you need to have a Favor available with a business owner in the Corner you want to build a Front at. Some of those folks may have the Upright trait, which means you cannot convince them to build a Front no matter what, forcing you to do so in a non-optimal spot.
Dragging new businesses into your protection racket requires you to have a good relationship with the person you are trying to extort, otherwise it doesn't work. When you do and it does, your relationship with them suffers a hit, and building relationships up takes a lot of work. Not only that, but it's also often literally impossible to befriend some folks, for certain reasons I won't bother explaining because it would take too long.
Leveling up your crew takes a rather long time, as does expanding your territory. Fighting other "gangs" is not very hard or troublesome, but it is not very interesting either. Acquiring new businesses, as I've said before, is pointless once you have a lot of cash. Setting them up is a nightmare. Trying to get your relationship up with hundreds of different people is an even bigger one. You can never get the vehicles you want, only by sheer luck. And if you bother doing all of that anyway, and you succeed, it's all just for money. Which, again, you don't need more of because you have nothing new or interesting to do with it.
To top it all, you have only up until December of 1933 to play. Once your time is up, the game ends, so you can't keep expanding and build an actual empire, dominate an entire city, or expand to others. No, none of that. The game ends, you get a score, and that's it.
After amassing ~US$150,000, destroying a couple of competing gangs, dominating 60 Corners or so, and producing 4 different types of booze, I was left with nothing but repetitive, annoying and ultimately pointless chores to do. I didn't even get to make any of the 3rd or 4th tier hooches, because why bother?
In short, City of Gangsters starts off pretty well, but the developers didn't quite think things through. The mid-game becomes quite boring, and there's no late game to speak of. And by the end of 1933 the game simply ends, turning all your hard work into nothing.
You can have fun with this game for 20-30 hours, like I did. But that's it. There's no point in playing it for longer than that.

I'd give it a 7/10. The best part of the game is the start. Once you get a corner speakeasy and tier 2 alcohol, the game runs out of challenges. With a couple crewmembers set up with tommy guns and level 3 combat skills, you can steamroll the other outfits with ease. I have no idea why you'd need tier 3 or 4 alcohol, there's nothing that expensive in the game to justify it. The game runs out of steam halfway through a run, but still, that first half is really great. I just wish they fleshed out the second half of the game more, and I have the main DLCs.

So this is honestly a middle of the road game, at least in my eyes. The mob stuff feels like its purely a backdrop. But a decently made one at that. Combat and negotiations are decided by traits and a dice roll. You will fight and talk to a normal hoodlum, as you would a mob boss.
I found the UI to be rather cluttered. The missions and the list of your mobsters, will fill the left and right of your screen. Pop ups for each thing that happened to your automated thugs. Which is thankfully a small notification but they do pile up, as the game goes on.
I believe this game, can be fun if you are in the right mood. If you enjoy managing supply lines, this game is great. The randomly generated maps give a lot of replay ability. But on the same note, can be a pain. If you luck isn't great.