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Gangsters is split into two main sections. The first, called the Gang Organizer, is the player's center of operations. This notebook organizer contains all the data and charts representative of your businesses and is constantly updated with information on your enemies, your hoods, your legal status and financial outlook. Here you'll be able to interact with your lawyer, accountant and lieutenants. Gangsters offers an impressive number of options while in the Organizer and allows you to truly act like the Godfather. You can promote and demote your hoods, beat up or kill lieutenants who aren't performing up to par, bribe police officers, police chiefs and the Mayor. You can even have particularly nasty judges killed off.
The second half of Gangsters is called the Working Week. This is where all the plans you set up in the Organizer are executed. Likewise, everything that happens during the Week is then recorded and displayed in the Organizer during the next round. During the Working Week you're given a ¾ view of New Temperance with cutaways of all the city buildings. Here, you'll be able to follow each of your hoods as they perform the tasks you gave them while in the Organizer. Order one of your lieutenants to recruit additional members? Watch him enter pool and boxing halls and extend offers of employment to the local thugs. Order one of your thugs to "dispose" of a troublesome store owner who refuses to pay up? Watch the store explode after your hood drops off a "package" on the doorstep. In real-time, every two minutes represent a full day in the Working Week, however you can accelerate or decelerate time as you see fit.
While only two-dimensional, the Working Week's visuals are impressive for a strategy game. Every building, car, train, street and person is extremely detailed, colorful and well animated. Navigating throughout the city is relatively simple, and made easier by tracking windows that you can assign anyone walking on the street. This way, you can keep tabs on all your hoods at once, even when their duties take them to opposite ends of New Temperance. There are several other viewing options available to you while in this mode. Aside from the ¾ view, there is an overhead rooftop view and an overhead street view. Both of these views are bland and lack detail. However, because gang members appear as bright dots against the dull gray background, these views are useful for monitoring rival gang activities.
Once the Working Week is over you're taken back to the Organizer, where you're fed a new set of information from which you plan out the coming week, and the cycle continues. You beat the game when you wipe out the three other rival gangs, get elected Mayor or go straight. The latter two are very difficult to accomplish and require a great amount of luck and money. Killing off the rival gangs is more or less the path you'll end up taking to finish the game almost every single time.
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