It was greed that killed the Candyman.

It was supposed to be a quick job. In and out.

Travis "Candyman" Baker decided to pull the job personally as a favor to a local cop. Bust the safe, grab the ring, and get out. Easy, until he saw all the diamonds, the cases of gold necklaces and watches. Before he knew it, he was pacing around a stack of bags crammed with jewelry and riddled with bullet holes, desperately trying to fight off the waves of cops with bullet-proof shields, stun batons, and assault rifles.

He died in a mash of blue uniforms and bloody loot bags.

Candyman's violent reign of Rockay City lasted 20 days and ended with a third of the neon-lit metropolis under his control. It earned him an A- and a smirking insult from Chuck Norris.

"You've been Chucked!"

Crime Boss: Rockay City, the first title from developer INGAME Studios, is a sometimes bewildering but always fun mash-up of Risk, Payday, and Mafia Wars. At its heart, it's an organized crime simulator that offers players a campaign specifically crafted for each playthrough. The piecemeal components organize together to deliver a story meant to be responsive to your play style, success, and fate.

The game's two robust cooperative modes – Crime Time and Urban Legends – give you and your friends a chance to heist your way through short encounters, a half dozen mini-campaigns.

But it's the campaign mode – which may one day expand to include a form of cooperative play – where the game really sings.

The first thing you need to understand going into the campaign is that you're not expected, not even likely, to survive your first attempt at wresting control of the town's 30 neighborhoods from the four competing gangs, all while trying to avoid too much heat from the police. And these gang leaders aren't generic thugs; each has a distinct personality, and two have familiar voices: Dollar Dragon is voiced by Danny Trejo, and Hielo is voiced by an often inappropriately beat-boxing Vanilla Ice.

Crime Boss is a game of trial by error as much as it is one of tactics and shooting acuity. Your chances of success increase each run-through both because you've learned from your attempt and because as you level up Travis Baker (voiced by Michael Madsen), you unlock skills and bonuses.

The game actually opens by dropping you into a nearly impossible situation, expecting you to lose. Once you do, it quickly restarts into a new run at controlling the city.

It's a blunt message. You're going to lose. Get used to it.

Gameplay is divided into two settings: The streets, where your heisting and turf warfare play out in first-person in real-time, and your suite, where you oversee your growing empire.
It's here where you can view a map of the city, color-coded to show you who controls which neighborhoods. Icons also show when a neighborhood can be grabbed, attacked, or needs to be defended and whether there are missions available to send your team out to.

The tactics of Crime Boss are surprisingly complex. Your end goal is to control the entire city, which you can only do by attacking territories and protecting them from counterattacks. You do this with your army, which grows in size as you expand your control of the city. The more neighborhoods you grab, the more money you earn from them each day, but they also can be quickly stretched thin. Grabbing an empty territory, for instance (which typically only happens at the start of the game) requires ten soldiers. Defending and attacking when other gangs are involved requires you to decide how many people you want to send out. Each person in your army is essentially another life when you get on the ground and start shooting it out. I say “essentially” because all but one in your army is controlled by AI. So you can lose people in your army no matter how good you are at playing a first-person shooter.

Attacks end when either you lose all of your people or when you kill off the other side. Occasionally, an overpowered "captain" will join the fight at the end, forcing you to kill them to win the territory.

Defending has another twist. You still have to decide on the size of your army, but you'll be controlling Touchdown (voiced by a delightfully unhinged Michael Rooker) during the entire conflict. Touchdown is your contact with the sort of folks who are up for hire to join your army. But when you're defending a territory, he's loaded down with a machine gun and has to essentially survive the encounter to win. If he dies and isn't revived, you lose the location, though he survives to fight another day.

On top of all of this, all of the gangs can pay to permanently upgrade their armies, giving them better weapons and making them harder to kill. It's not hard to do this, but it is expensive and comes down to weighing what makes the most sense.

Ultimately, you'll find that money management is a big part of the game. You spend it to pay your army. You spend it to defend and attack. You spend it to plan missions. And you spend it on hiring and equipping your heist teams. You can even spend cash to outfit your office with furniture and such, all of which give you little bonuses and perks during the playthrough.

While the map is where you'll spend your time deciding on which territories to attack and defend and which heists and missions to pull off, Goals sends you to Baker's office where he can kick off longer-term schemes, like asking folks to infiltrate an enemy mob to get details on their missions, or finding out what's going on in the city that might be ripe for the looting. 

You also have the option to build out your heist team. These are folks who only go on the missions you take on. Here you can upgrade team members, change their load-outs and hire characters to stick around until they die. Baker is always an option for your mission team, and he brings a lot of benefits with him. He has higher health, whatever perks you've unlocked through replay, and – perhaps most importantly – doesn't take a cut from your heists. That's right, those other team members all take a cut from whatever you happen to grab. If you bring the maximum of four characters, you could be losing as much as a third of what your take is, and all of that can have a big impact on your chances of long-term success.

In Baker's office, you can view your non-cash stash and sell items based on the current price trend. There are five types of loot – luxuries, drugs, gems, precious metals, and electronics – each of which fluctuates in price daily. It's here where you can also see a rundown of your stash value, daily turn income, and daily cash spent. 

Finally, selecting entourage allows you to see the perks you've unlocked for Baker, right-hand-man Nasara (voiced by Damion Poitier), former detective Gloves (Danny Glover), money manager Casey (Kim Basinger), and war vet thug Touchdown.

A typical day will see you working to slowly expand your territories – either with easy claims or through attacks – until your army has all been used. And then selecting missions until you've used up everyone on your team. Once you can't do much more, you click on the calendar, and the day changes, recalculating your cash on hand.

Weaved into this are missions and events that pop up, either randomly or based on some of the decisions you've made during that particular playthrough.

So, for instance, you might have Nasara tell you that you need to pay out $60,000 to the families of dead soldiers one day, or maybe another gang leader offers you cash to leave them be for a week. 

There are also plenty of missions, some of which can become quite complex, like trying to arrange all of the moving parts needed to rob a moving train loaded down with cash and diamonds.

Finally, there are the cops, led by Sheriff Norris (voiced by Chuck Norris), who become increasingly active on your map the more brazen you become during heists. Anger them enough, and they'll free some of your territories from your control.

While the strategic, birds-eye view of Rockay City and your attempts to control it are fun, that's only part of the game. You need to get your hands dirty a lot.

Turf wars are pretty straightforward, but the missions and heists offer a lot of variety to the play. 
If you're robbing a strip mall, for instance, you can just go in guns blazing, killing civilians, cops, everyone, and then smashing and grabbing the loot you can get and fleeing in the getaway car. 

But there are also options to sneak through a mission. You can take out security cameras, threaten, and then zip-tie would-be witnesses and guards, do silent kills, and hide bodies. There's lockpicking, safe cracking, wandering a map looking for new routes.

When it becomes most fun, though, is when you go in trying to pull off the perfect silent heist and then are surprised by a cop, or accidentally fire off your gun and all hell breaks loose. Police response, no matter what you're doing on these missions, scales up quickly, and if you hang around too long, you're simply not going to survive.

The good news is that you can leave whenever you want, as long as you get to the getaway vehicle. The bad news is that you only take with you whatever you put in the van. So if you have eight bags of loot just sitting by the door of a jewelry store, for instance, it's hard not to be tempted to try and go back for all of it. 

In my personal experience, that never ends well.

During missions, you and your characters also each have buffs and debuffs. Baker's are based on what you've given him over time, but the soldiers seem randomized. So you want to make sure the one you're hiring doesn't, for instance, have decreased health, or "bleeds easily." Or that they're a “butterfingers,” meaning their weapons sway more. You can also find some that have extra revives or can carry more loot bags. During each mission, not only can you command these soldiers, but you can switch between them on the fly. You also need to make sure they don't die in a mission because once they can no longer be revived, you lose them for good.

Eventually, when you lose Baker – and you will – the game ends, and everything starts over on day one. But not before you get a grade and a fade-to-black insult from Sheriff Norris. 

You also get the ability to select permanent perks for your entourage based on how much you leveled up during your run.

While the game offers Crime Time, and Urban Legends modes to play with friends, the big draw for me has been the campaign and the desire to manage, heist, and shoot my way to city kingpin. The team at INGAME Studios appears to be aware of that draw and hopes to expand the campaign in a number of ways post-release. That includes perhaps adding the ability to play with and maybe even against friends in the campaign.

"The first step would be to allow players to invite their friends for their own campaign," said Crime Boss: Rockay City development director Jarek Kolář. "As a campaign player, we would like to add in the future possibility that you can invite your friends to help you with some of the biggest heists.

"Obviously, a game where you would compete with all the other players over the map, that's definitely an interesting idea, but the pacing of such a game will be different."

Kolář said there are a lot of challenges in turning the race for dominance in Rockay City into a competitive multiplayer game. Not least of which would be that pacing issue and what other players would be doing when one is conducting a turf war against the computer.

The biggest plans on the game's roadmap, though, are built around the interesting way the campaign was structured. Instead of creating a game with a single, linear path, the campaign is built by the game's AI putting together a set of modules based on player behavior to construct the campaign and its story on the fly.

Post-release, the team plans on releasing more of these modules to the campaign to increase how different each playthrough is.

"The narrative is composed of elements, events, and from plotlines," he said. "So the way we have planned to enrich this game is by adding more pieces to it. So imagine that you buy a box of LEGO bricks, and you can play with it for 10 hours or 20 hours, and then you buy another box, and you just put it into the pile that you already have. Suddenly, it's not a different game, it's just the same game, but you have more pieces and more things. This is the main idea of how we want to expand this game."

Typically, in a single run-through of the campaign, you might encounter one or two big heists; these are culminating events that wrap up different potential plot lines. At launch, the game has a total of four or five of these big events. The idea, Kolář said, is to add more of these specifically.

The current plan is to release updates every month. Some will be new features. Some will be pieces placed in the game's narrative machine. Paid DLC will also play a role in the form of story plotlines that lead to major new missions. While you won't be able to access these in the campaign or host them in multiplayer without purchasing, you will be able to play alongside a friend if they own and host one of these missions.

You can pick up Crime Boss: Rockay City now for PC on the Epic Games Store, and console versions are planned for sometime later this year. And don't forget that Crime Boss is on sale with a 15 percent discount until 11 a.m. April 4.