In recent years the videogame industry has spawned some absolute monstrosities, and Ride to Hell Retribution, and Enemy Front are the best examples of this phenomena, however, as bad as these games were, they are nowhere near as terrible as Maximum Games’ Alkeheine’s Gun. Alekheine’s Gun, is the most peculiar game of the current generation so far. It feels like a relic of the past rather than a new title. It looks, plays, and sounds like a game released in the very early days of the Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3 era, and not a very good one either.
Upon the initial start-up, Alekheine’s Gun doesn’t look that bad. Yes, the main menu is comical, and an image of the protagonist is so odd, it barely resembles a human being, but ultimately it is not a complete catastrophe. However, everything that succeeds the main menu, after the player starts up the new game, is unbearably painful.
Mimicking every triple A title ever to be released, Alekheine’s Gun opens with a cut-scene. However, such is not an in-engine animation, but just a poorly executed slideshow. Images used within it have not been drawn by the artists which have worked on the game, but instead, they are composed with the use of in-game stills with a sketch visual effect overlay. Visual execution of the stills is not only lazy, but also unbelievably poor, as once the gravely effect is overlaid over the extremely ugly character models and environments, it makes it look like a homo erectus cave paintings. Low visual quality of the ‘’cut-scenes’’ persists throughout the entirety of the game, however, players who decide to pick this monstrosity up will not be bothered by it, as the voice acting will surely grab their attention.
Voice actors who have undertook the challenge of providing voice-overs for in-game characters, are the true stars of this digital debacle. During my playthrough of Alekheine’s Gun, I was rushing through every level simply to be graced with another dose of the glorious voice acting. And I have to admit, it was definitely worth it, as I haven’t had such a good laugh in years. In-game performances are quite frankly tragic. Every single line of in-game dialogue sounds like it was delivered be people, who have never interacted with another human being. They’re either deprived of any genuine emotions, or are so over the top, they sound like that one kid we all had in our GCSE drama class, who thought that one day he/she is going to be receiving an Academy Award. While performances themselves are a complete fiasco, the technical execution of such is even worse, as throughout the game many dialogues feature background noises such as footsteps, and faint taps. Poor mechanical execution can be found throughout the entirety of the product, miles beyond the tragic voice acting, and catastrophic cut-scenes. In fact, Alekheine’s Gun is a one, big, and complete flaw.
While being a blatant copy of the Hitman franchise, Alekheine’s Gun fails to even remotely touch upon its success. Main protagonist may move just like Agent 47, but he’s nothing more than a cheap, brazen, and defective copy. Just like the previously mentioned Hitman, it features a detection mechanic. Meaning that if you are in a place where you not supposed to be, or have just done something which you shouldn’t have, then nearby foes will sound an alarm. However, such conduct of proceedings in Alekheine’s Gun is just a theory.
During my playthrough, I’ve done a lot of things which should have rang the alarm bells. I’ve murdered targets centimetres away from their body guards, I’ve walked with an assault rifle straight into a building, passing countless Nazi soldiers, and last but not least, I’ve jogged through a security checkpoint wearing just the starting suit. Not a single one of these actions have resulted in enemies entering the alert state or even raising a gun. However, once I’ve tried to open a lock tens of meters away from a nearest security guard, but as soon as I’ve attempted to do so, he has alerted his friends, and gunned me down within seconds.
Death is a common occurrence in Alekheine’s Gun, as the AI is eerily unpredictable, and you never know when it is going to kick off and slaughter you. However, death just like in many other stealth games is not a problem as you can simply restart, and go back to the last checkpoint. Well, such statement is true for games such as Metal Gear Solid V, but not for Alekheine’s Gun and this is because the latter, does not feature an automatic save system. And the only way to learn that such is the case, is to die and lose hours of progress. Hours, as the game doesn’t save even after you’ve completed a level, so if the player has completed two or three levels in the row, without saving manually, then he/she has to go back to the very beginning.
I’ve found out about Alekheine’s Gun, lack of any automatic saving system the hard way after I’ve completed the first three levels and decided to call it a night. And the next day, when I’ve decided to fire it up again, I was speechless when the only available option for me was to start a new game. Normally, I would just delete it from the disk, and forget about it, but I had to play it in order to write this review. On my second playthrough, I’ve made sure to save the game upon completion of each and every objective, and everything was going swimmingly until the end of chapter 5. When attempting to save the game, before turning it off as I could not bear to play it in 5 frames per second any longer, the game crashed. Thinking nothing of it, I’ve sent the crash report, and I’ve turned my console off, but little did I know, there was nothing I could go back to, as my save file was corrupted, and the game crashed once again while attempting to load it. In order to fix it, I had to delete all game files, and the corrupted save file, as Alekheine’s Gun would even refuse to turn itself on at that point.
In conclusion, Alekheine’s Gun, is an insult to the videogame industry. It is flawed in each and every way possible. It doesn’t have a single redeeming quality as everything about it is simply tragic. It’s unpleasant to the eye, and looks like a product of the late 2005, and collectively feels like a first time project of amateur developers. Additionally, it is riddled with bugs and glitches which make the whole game barely playable, and to make matters worse the game folds faster than a £5 side table from IKEA, whenever it displays more than four objects on the screen. However, one could argue that by becoming a literal slideshow at certain points, the game tries to imitate its cut-scenes in order to maintain artistic cohesion…