When I look this game up when it was said to be coming to Xbox One I instantly loved the look of it, it has a beautiful film noir feel about.
The whole game is shot in greyscale with the only colour being emphasised is Red. Think of Schindlers List and the Girl in the red dress, It’s that sort of style.
Throughout the episodes when there’s water effects across the screen to indicate the rain etc, it looks really good and is well done. The areas you are in in general are wonderfully designed and nicely detailed too.
The games story takes after an Eliot Ness, a former detective/police officer who now runs a diner. Eliot is enjoying a lovely time in retirement running his diner when a blast from the past comes back to haunt him. Flashbacks occur to show the relationship between Ness and Al Capone, and what happened 20 years previous which put Capone in jail.
Capone now out of jail require Ness’ help to find his granddaughter who has been kidnapped. Capone sends his right hand man Milton along with ness to try and solve the case.
Within the game there are murders that have to be solved by searching the house or area that you are in for clues and putting them all together on a Detective board. This allows you to keep a track of what is going on in this part of the investigation, and is very nicely done as Ness’ commentary keeps you going to help you through.
There are fight scenes within the game where you have to take people on either fist fights or gun fights. Both of which are exceedingly easy as it’s just a point and shoot for gun fights or press the appropriate button for fist fight.
The game is very good when it comes to making choices as well, as you not only make choices based on the situation, but also character based choices as well such as drink whiskey or juice whether to serve someone and add more sauce to their burger and things like that.
There were a few things that got to me about the game. The movement with the characters is so slow and feels so lethargic, it doesn’t feel like you’re moving at all sometimes. To go with the movement some of the animations don’t match what the character is doing or the situation that is occurring, which I found a bit disappointing. Also the mouth and facial movements could do with some work as well.
I found the game very linear, and it was easy to know where to go and what to do. Things to make out in the world were clearly marked, which I think maybe difficulties added to the game would be good do that these aren’t as visible to see as well as making fight scenes a bit harder.
There was also no way to move the camera around so that you could see different angles on the area that you’re in.
Overall I think this is a good start to the episodic adventure and I enjoyed the start to story and style of the game and I look forward to the next episodes.
