Paradise City is a cruel city ruled by a gangster-organisation more powerful than anything the NSA has seen before. Known as the Aeternitas-case all agents but the special agent Walther J. Kovacs refuse to take over the case of the mysterious disappearance of all the cops in the city. To find out who is behind all this he forces three individuals to work for him. Since each of them has a different task in solving the puzzle and operate in different parts of the city, the player only controls one of them at once. The three characters are very different.
Nicolas “Nick” Porter is a former thief and was forced to choose between life in prison or working for the NSA. He’s specialised in range combat and uses guns and machine-pistols. Angel Vargas is instead more into close combat and uses her fists, knives and bats. She got the job because she killed a cellmate that tried to kill her. The last of them is Boris Chekov. He’s a corrupt cop that is used to command people around and only trusts pistols.
Since the game is a mix of RPG and Strategy, you earn experience points for completing quests and killing thugs. Once you level up you gain attribute and skill points. With the attribute points you improve your mental and physical stats. The skill points are instead used to advance in the three different skill-trees “Marksmanship”, “Tricks of the trade” and “Crowd control”. Of course this isn’t enough to deal with all those bad guys so you can also find and buy different kinds of items and weapons to give your character even more advantage.
The strategy and managerial part of the game manifests itself in the fact that the maps are divided into districts. You conquer these districts by “persuading” the district boss. He will then tell all the shops that you are the new boss and the money flows in. But in a city with such a high crime rate, you can’t leave a district alone while conquering another. You’ve to hire thugs that guard the district and defend it against enemy attacks.
The four different kinds of thugs are range and melee fighters, medics and a scout which runs through the district and alarms the other when he sees an enemy inside the district. To make your guys more powerful you can buy some upgrades for them.
The game also features two multiplayer-modes called “Assassination” and “Domination”. While the goal in “Assassination” is to kill the enemy players a specified number of times, you need to conquer all districts on the map in the “Domination”-mode.
