GANGSTERS: IT'S GOOD TO BE BAD

If you're a prohibition era organized crime fan or if you like turn based/real time strategies I recommend gangsters. It's based in a prohibition era fictional city. You start out as a lowly boss in your own gang of up to ten. Each week, you assign your gang jobs, i.e. the turn based portion of the game, and then play out that week with control over whether an "employee" should flee from a gunfight, whether they should attack someone, or if they should return to the base.
The course of a game starts with you sending your hoods out recruiting and intimidating the neighborhood into a protection racket. When the protection money rolls in you are able to recruit a lawyer and accountant, buy better weapons for your men, buy buildings in the neighborhood to set up speakeasies, casinos, bordellos, etc. You can really go nuts until you run into a rival gang or the feds get wise to your operation.
The thing that I really enjoyed about Gangsters is the freedom to organize your mob any way you want. You can be really violent and get in to an all out gangwar or keep to your own and avoid conflict. You can put as much of the police force on the take if you want, as well as bribe the local churches and newspapers. Gangsters is incredibly deep in this way.
The interface is a little difficult to learn, but isn't too bad once you have a good feel for it. The graphics are very nice renderings of circa 1930s Chicago buildings. The sound is good, though I can't seem to get the soundtrack out of my head.
Most of the problems that I had with Gangsters, crashing, ai problems, were fixed with the patch. When your gang becomes more of an empire, there are a lot of details that become tedious, i.e., regular jobs, though you are able to give regular orders for some tasks, i.e. collecting protection. I relate Gangsters to XCOM in the fact that a lot of the fun from the beginning of the game is lost when micromanagement becomes the most time consuming element of the game. After I had a pretty good foothold on the city I lost interest and stopped playing, though I do have friends that still play Gangsters regularly.
Overall, I had fun playing Gangsters and would recommend it to people who like very detail oriented strategy games.