Last year, I heard about a relatively small game titled Alekhine’s Gun. The way it was pitched to me was Hitman: Blood Money meets a Cold War espionage story. Obviously, this sounds absolutely brilliant and has lots of potential so when I finally got my hands on this game last week, I was thrilled.
Unfortunately, Alekhine’s Gun mostly fails to deliver on the hype I built up for it. The game is riddled with bugs and technical issues. AI let you waltz through restricted areas with no consequences, the lighting in the game is a mess, and there are many other small bugs that take away from the experience such as elevator doors not closing properly allowing you to see empty white spaces in the level between the floors.
The worst part about this game is the awful lighting. In the very first level I could barely see so I went to adjust the gamma in the options menu. There is no gamma meter or really any options at all. You can’t even invert controls or turn off subtitles. The fact you can’t adjust even adjust the brightness is absurd. You’re forced to play this game with some of the worst lighting I have ever seen. If you want to go into a dark room in the game you will barely be able to find your way through the room because the lighting is absolutely atrocious. After playing for a long period of time my eyes actually began to hurt. The lighting is at its worst when you’re outside in the middle of the day. It makes every person look like a giant walking shadow and actually makes the screen look super dark. It’s almost as if the game has some sort of filter placed over the camera to give it some sort of awful effect.
Alekhine’s Gun sadly doesn’t strive in its gameplay either. On paper, the gameplay sounds pretty great but the game just doesn’t execute the concept very well. You have some of the mechanics of Hitman: Blood Money like disguising yourself with clothes you find lying around and using things you find in the environment to kill your targets and making all the deaths look like accidents or just straight up going in and murdering everyone with your guns like a terrible assassin. This all sounds great, but some of the controls are incredibly clunky which results in frustration and annoyance. You have to stand behind people to kill them or you’ll just have to punch them or shoot them. If I have a rag with chloroform on it I should be able to stuff it in their face even if I am standing right in front of them! Obviously, it’s not the ideal approach but in a game that promotes killing your targets any way you please, I should be able to eliminate the target the way I want.
The game also likes to say you can create accidents to kill your targets. While this is true, it’s always incredibly complicated to achieve this and there are rarely any hints on how to make your target’s death look like a complete accident. I usually just end up blindly stumbling around looking for things that might kill my target until I eventually just get so frustrated I just end up strangling the target to death the old fashioned way. This doesn’t feel nearly as satisfying when you’ve done that to literally almost every other character you’ve killed. When you do finally stage a death to look like an accident, it’s beyond satisfying but most of the time all the pieces to make this puzzle of death come together are so hidden or obscure you won’t even get this feeling of satisfaction that many times throughout the game. I’m not saying that it shouldn’t be difficult to stage these accidents, but when there is no indication as to what to even look for to make this happen and all the video walkthroughs I have seen can’t figure it out, that’s a problem.
The story for Alekhine’s Gun is fairly interesting, it’s nothing mind-blowing but it had my interest throughout my playthrough. You are Agent Alekhine, an alias named after the famous Russian chess player, Alexander Alekhine. You are tasked with killing dozens of targets in a variety of locations like New York City and Texas. The game centers itself around big historical events in U.S. history such as the Kennedy assassination in 1963. The game is set in a really interesting time frame. I don’t want to get into plot details too much but it’s a fairly competent espionage story that I think anyone could enjoy. Each cutscene appears to be drawn or painted. It’s told through captivating still images that are drawn with such beautiful detail that it resembles something out of an old noir film. It’s incredibly beautiful to look at.
Summary
Alekhine’s Gun is, for the most part, a massive disappointment. I was really rooting for this game to be good as it takes elements from games I love and has a unique setting. On paper, the game sounds brilliant but they just don’t execute it properly. Maybe with more time or a larger budget the game could have been better, but who is to say? Maximum Games has said they plan on making sequels, so if that is true I hope they will learn from this game and take their time with the sequel and iron out the bugs and spruce the game up a bit. This series has lots of potential and it truly pains me to give it the score I am about to give it, but honesty is the best policy and I hope someone at Maximum Games takes this into consideration when they begin work on the sequel for Alekhine’s Gun.
Cade is a games journalist, Gaming Writer at ComicBook.com. They contributed 108 articles to ICXM between 2015–2017, focused on opinion pieces, game reviews, and Xbox news: served as Editor-in-Chief at GameZone before joining ComicBook.com.