Review: Blues and Bullets

Eliot Ness (Eliot Ness) - the national hero of America. An honest, principled treasurer, who in 1929 led a group of special agents of the US Treasury, dubbed "Untouchables" by journalists. They hunted the main mafia of America - it was Ness and his people who were imprisoned for 11 years by Al Capone and cleared Cleveland of corruption. And as a reward they received a small increase in their pensions and a bonus clock. About Nessand his team wrote books, filmed the series, and in 1987 came the film "Untouchables" Brian De Palma (Brian De Palma) with Kevin Costner(Kevin Costner) in the title role. So, in the new episodic adventure Blues and Bullets from the young studio A Crowd of Monsters Eliot Ness works ... on Al Capone.

No, the scriptwriter of the game, Josue Monchan (he wrote in Pendulo Studios stories for Runaway and Yesterday) did not go crazy and did not decide to desecrate the memory of the national hero of America. He just invented an alternative story and image for him. 

In Blues and Bullets, he looks more like a typical detective from noir films - in a long cloak and with a bottle of whiskey in his hands. Once he drank, shot, almost sent Al Capone to the next world (in the end, the main mafia "only" sat down for 20 years), and now leads a quiet life in the fictional city of Santa Esperantza, where he prepares pies and pours out coffee in its own diner.

After 20 years, Al Capone, who recently left prison, asks his main enemy ... to find his missing granddaughter, Alice. Ness, who missed the detective work, again changes his apron to a long cloak and takes to work. In the process, he will have to face such things, that against their backdrop both corruption and mafia disassembly will fade away. The kidnapping of children, ritual murders, corpses with torn eyes and teeth - the reasons to reap the bottle again will be enough. 

Naturally, such a gloomy noir story is made in black and white stylistics with shades of blood-red - we immediately remember the "City of Sins". Constant rain, biting dialogues with the right amount of cynicism or irony, Eliot's hoarse voice and beautiful female vocals, performing a sad jazz composition, everything perfectly works for a gloomy noir-atmosphere.

However, going back to the bottle, let's say that you decide: will drink Eliot Ness juice or whiskey? After all, in its basic structure, Blues and Bullets - this is quite typical Telltale- like adventure. The hero explores the locations, communicates a lot, periodically fights with enemies (and we help him by pressing the specified keys in time) and takes more or less important decisions. We are not told that such and such a character has remembered how you acted, but the time to choose the same is sometimes limited.

True, in the first episode we almost did not see the same important dilemmas affecting the events, as in The Walking Dead and The Wolf Among Us , where you could decide who to live for, who to die for and where to go first to find evidence. Only one choice made at the very beginning, when we play for the kidnapped girl, will have real consequences in the ending of the episode. And one more, most likely, will affect in the future. 

And yet the decision whether to drink or not to drink, shake Al Capone's hand or first give it in the face, and then shake, freak out and shoot the piano in front of the child or immediately put the gun aside, are also important, since they form psychological portrait of your hero. 

But A Crowd of Monstersalmost the first decided to expand the format of such advenchur. First, in Blues and Bullets , in addition to dialogues and research of active points, there is still an action with shelters. We have to shoot a little, only twice per episode, and the mechanics of such shootings is extremely simple. And yet, in a similar format, it looks quite fresh and interesting. 

Secondly, from the adventure series about the adventures of Sherlock Holmes from the French-Ukrainian studio Frogwaresthe deductive mechanics is borrowed. Once at the scene of the cruel ritual murder, we should carefully look around, examine the body, collect all the evidence, notice all the important details and in a special menu, picking up the facts found, answering the questions: what happened, how the killer got into the house, whether at that moment Is someone else here? However, in comparison with the "Frogwary" quests, everything is simpler here - it is impossible in principle to make a mistake by placing the evidence in the wrong logical chain, because you will not be allowed to do it.

However, the only serious claim is not an oversimplification (in comparison with the same blood-Noir The Wolf Among Us , one needs to think just a little), but weak optimization. Looks Blues and Bullets very stylish, but not so chic to periodically "slow down". In other respects, the game causes extremely enthusiastic emotions. Action and adventure, film-noir, mafia and ritual murders with the search for a maniac, Al Capone, who lives in a huge airship hovering over the city, and Russian bandit Ivankov, who lives on his own submarine - Hosue Moncheng and his colleagues came up with a very unusual mixture . 

Rate: 8/10