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Thursday 30 August, 2018
My third session went for around 2.5 hours. At this point I entered fully in the Sand and Varga gang war. The game continues to create challenges by keeping up on crimes while keeping the various other agents (mafia, City Hall, officers) in the game happy. Unfortunately for protagonist Jack Boyd, I must have failed to keep someone happy, because Jack was assassinated a few days into the war. I don’t believe on that day that I didn’t do any mafia missions, but I assume making Sand angry is what ended in Jack’s death. I replayed the day to try and see if things would end differently and fortunately Jack did survive on my second attempt. I don’t believe I did any more to help Sand on my repeat, but the gang war did lean in his favor at the days end, so I must have done something better. Attempting to keep corruption to a minimum, I have avoided some of the options presented by the mafia. I still haven’t used them to kill of any of my officers, as I have had valid in-game reasons to legally fire those that were not performing optimally. It has been tempting to kill the poorly performing son of a businessman who bought me more officer slots, but even if killing him off might be better for my performance in the game I would rather not play that way. This isn’t to say I have been playing entirely cleanly, as I have sold a few of the weapons and drugs recovered in crimes to gain some extra money. At this point I have given in to the fact that the game is going to present fewer and fewer options for keeping a clean conscience. I’d be interested to know how far someone can actually make it in the game playing completely by the book, not allowing any shenanigans with the mafia or city hall to interfere. As a final note, I like the amount of character given to Jack in the story. While he begins the game apprehensive of the fully corrupt options available later on, Jack is not given an extremely defined outlook on what he is willing to do in order to make the money he needs and keep himself alive. In this way it helps make the player feel more in charge of the decisions made in the game, while still tying them into Jack’s fate. In the story, he’s the one facing the moral dilemmas, but the player is really the one left to choose.
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