At least near-side walls and doors do become translucent when something is happening behind them. While at times this can be frustrating it does remove all elements of fiddle and faff. Beyond a basic panning around you’re limited to a fixed view-point: no swivelling, no rotating. This technical hurdle has been not so much jumped over as thrown to one side: in effect all control has been taken away. The next infamous bug-bear of 3D isometric games is viewpoint manipulation – the need to be constantly at the camera controls to see what’s happening and who’s hiding behind what. It makes conducting a battle surprisingly peaceful. Whereas in other games (Max Payne, Prince of Persia) you can slow the world around you to gain the upper hand, here the time effect is aimed to help you think. That’s everyone: not only the enemies but your chaps too. Until time runs out you’ll see everything and everyone slow down. To make things easier Chicago 1930 gives you a fob-watch that slows down time when you click it. It’s so often a nightmare to find and click on all your troops and direct each one to a specific action: shoot HIM pick up that Tommy-gun over there. One of the most glaring is the possibility of a click-frenzy whenever things get frantic. We are seeing interesting fixes for the basic shortcomings of the isometric 3D team-tactics genre. You’ll either be working your way through a crime family or working the streets trying to clean them up (in a law-enforcement sense, not public hygiene). Your outings will involve a mix of stealth, information gathering and all-out war, and of course each one is set within the context of a story arc.
The basic game has you gathering and equipping a team of cops or gangsters then leading them out in various missions. The formula of Desperadoes and Robin of Sherwood (both similar games on the PC), has been applied to the world of fedora hats, pencil-thin moustaches and speak-easies. The rest of the game, however, lags far, far behind these rare moments. This kernel of action is at the heart of what makes Chicago 1930 reasonably entertaining: gathering a small band of characters and making them execute a basic tactical plan, and more often than not blowing somebody away in the name of crime or anti-crime (i.e. When you’re flanked by a giant goon and a weasel-faced knife-wielder, and the slo-mo makes everybody’s yells sound deep and drawn-out, the effect is funny as well as fun. It’s undeniably appealing to storm into a motel room and gun down three chatting hoodlums, especially in slow motion.
0 kommentar(er)
