Thursday, 24 March 2016

Alekhine's Gun Review - A Colossal Mess!


By Sam Coles:

You know when you play a game that is really bad when you can only say one or two positives about it; Alekhine’s Gun is one of those games. The titular title is name after a chess move, but this game is far from clever and tactical because it is marred with issues such as graphical problems, audio and A.I.

You play as Alekhine a KGB agent working for the CIA who must take on various missions to infiltrate, assassinate and gain information on the enemy during the 60’s in the height of the Cold War. The first mission takes place in a German castle in style of Wolfenstein where you must assassinate a Nazi officer and scientist. It had potential but is immediately staggered by the first problem I have with this game and that is the lighting, the game has terrible lighting effects because it’s either too bright with the sun or in darkness you can’t see a thing. You would think that there would be some visual options to tweak this problem right? No! There are no visual options at all, something that is so basic in every game under the sun like a gamma slide bar, but it is not present and turning the brightness up and down your TV will not help.

The gameplay is like Hitman, but only if Agent 47 was suddenly hit by a heavy goods vehicle and he forgot the concept of stealth and assassination. It does remind of Hitman 2 and Blood Money where before each mission you can prepare what tools and weapons you’re going to take on the mission and the levels are sandboxes where you can approach the mission anyway you want to, but the mechanics of the game fail it over all.

The A.I is laughable I haven’t played a game with such terrible A.I since Mindjack because you could shoot someone right in front of a guard with an unsuppressed weapon and they will act like nothing has happened. I can be right in front of a guard with a garrotte wire in my hands trying to kill them and they won’t have a care in the world. This a stealth game the A.I plays a key role in these types of games, even if the A.I is basic with their patrol routes I would of taken that over what I have with this game.

The audio also a problem because when you start the game it starts with a stylised static cutscene which is extremely quiet, like any logical person would do I turned the volume up. However when gameplay started the game is extremely loud where it almost perforated my ear drums, whoever was the audio engineer on this game needs to be fired because the audio has no balance at all.

The graphics look like an early PS2 game this game could of easily ran on a Xbox 360 and PS3 and yes I get why it was released on Xbox One and PS4 to move with the times, but the game doesn’t look like it belongs on these systems. The textures are blurry and bland where it looks like I’ve rubbed excrement in my eyes; this unacceptable for a 2016 release to have graphics that are this bland. The character models are poor with terrible animations and lip syncing with movements being unnatural, it looks like a bunch kids acting in a school play, that’s how bad the animation is.

Alekhine’s Gun had some potential with its Cold War setting because that period of history was all about espionage which a stealth should of worked. Due to the poor controls, terrible A.I, horrendous sound design and abysmal graphics it fails on every level. Do not buy this game there are better stealth games out there even games that are older than this game. Save your money for something else.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Blog Archive