Gangland is a mix of real time strategy with
Commandos-like squad based action. Ultimately you control a number of guys on the street and send them around to do your dirty work in the city. Their abilities vary depending on who they are or where they are, but you get a sort of god-like feel commanding these hooligans.
The main campaign mode revolves around you, a son of an Italian mob boss, who is sent to America to kill his renegade brothers. The beginning of the game sees you running errands for your uncle, killing people, extorting businesses and the like. This first part is relatively slow, but later in the game you get to move up to be boss of the gang (for various reasons) and start running the whole show. This is where things get interesting.
Once you attain the title of boss, you get your very own safe house where you organize all of your devious plans. If this safe house falls, it's game over. Fortunately you have a number of ways of stopping this from happening. You can extort local businesses to get weapons, money and commodities to trade on an international market. With more money you can hire more goons and arm them with weapons from a weapon shop you are extorting, and take them out on raids.
All out combat isn't your only method of survival though. As boss you can marry a woman and have a child who will grow up to become an under-boss. Under-bosses help run your gang and lend more power to you. You can also put out hits, hire infiltrators, make and break alliances, loan money, borrow money, anything you could think of that would have some illegal aspect to it. There are some really cool things you can do to your enemies, but it takes a while to get to that point.
Unfortunately, most of the missions are as bland as the locale. Most involve going out and killing somebody, or making money, or gaining enough turf to satisfy the victory conditions. Though the method of getting to the end of a level is interesting, it gets a little old after a while. Things are mixed up a bit in between levels by a number of challenges you can partake in, like racing from one side of the city to another while under fire, but these don't completely break the monotony of things.
The Multiplayer mode is a nice addition to things as it lets 8 players try to kill each other in a virtual city. Things can get pretty interesting here as you have free reign to do whatever you want to your opponents, as opposed to adhering to guidelines like in the single player mode. There are also Multiplayer shootouts where you ditch all the strategy stuff and just take a group of guys at each other and shoot it out in the street. Short and sweet is the name of that game.
