I had no idea what to expect when I was trolling the dregs of new releases on Steam. You never know with these things as sometimes you find a hidden gem, while other times you question why video games even exist. British Gangsters is interesting because while it clearly falls on the bad end of the spectrum, I don’t totally hate it. I just wish the concept could have been done more justice.
British Gangsters is a simple game, to the point that I feel the whole thing would work a lot better as a mobile offering instead of a full-blown PC release. On the surface, you get a game that takes from the like of Time Crisis and Virtua Cop in its mechanics. It’s a genre (on-rails shooter) that has almost totally gone the way of the Dodo, but one that is close to my cold, jaded heart.
The game sees your character move from area to area on their own and it’s your job is to leave cover to pop some caps in some 1960s British arses. It’s about as simple a game as you can have in 2019. You move to an area and automatically initiate cover. You can then hit the Space-bar to pop out of cover allowing you to use your mouse to target enemies.
Enemies pop out and will try and shoot you before you can shoot them. Red circles will appear on an enemy signaling that they are about to fire on you. The circle shrinks once gone will see the enemies unloading on you. This gives you a little time to react and choose your targets for the most possible damage.
Reloading is done automatically, whether you need to or not. Whenever you go into cover you’ll automatically reload your current weapon. It a very arcade-like experience that starts off great, but just as with the games pays homage to, never really expands beyond its initial shtick.
British Gangsters does it’s best by allowing you to carry more than your basic sidearm. Before heading into each stage you can select a secondary weapon to make things easier and give you more options. As you play the game you’ll also unlock more weapons that do help to mix things up, if only a little.
But don’t go thinking that this is a deep experience as those secondary weapons are mostly useless during the bulk of the stages. A quick eye and trigger finger will see you complete each stage with only your sidearm unless you are just horrible at pointing and shooting. Get to an area, pick out the enemy fire pattern, pop up and get some head-shots.
Those head-shots result in an instant kill for all but the toughest of enemies. Body shots require more lead to be pumping into them, but sticking to the head is really the only way to play this sort of game. It all works and I never had any issues with the mechanics of the game, I only have an issue with the lack of things done with those mechanics.
Enemies are mostly the same models repeated, with some oddball enemies thrown at you along the way because of reasons. Zombies just sort of happen out of the blue about half-way through the game. There is a story but it makes little sense the way it’s told. You are a group of secret agents for Great Britain in the 1960s, which means groovy stuff and, of course, all manner of ancient evils. It’s weird, makes no sense, but is charming in its own right.
There are boss fights too, well, one boss fight that you just repeat over and over again during the game with minor tweaking during the late game bits. Some sort of evil Arabian wizard shows up at the end of several stages to mix things up a little, and by little I do mean little. His fight is simply repeated over and over. He has some mechanical flying bugs that can kill you in a single hit, but other than that he isn’t a problem.
The only thing that you might struggle with is the time limit set by the stages themselves. The boss’s life-bar is pretty dense and your pea-shooter just won’t get the job done. So, pick a nice secondary weapon and save it until the end where you can unload it only on the boss. You can also earn extra time by playing well in past levels. It all works, but that’s about the best thing I can say about the game. It all works fine.
I know that this is a small game that is trying to recapture some of the magic of the arcade rail-shooters in the early 90s, but it feels more like cheap imitation than anything resembling a tribute. I hate to say it, but British Gangsters does sometimes feel like a game about cutting corners to get something out to market. This is a real shame as some tweaking to the story layout and additions like anything resembling sound design could have really made this into something cool
The game features semi-animated comic book panels to tell its story, but it doesn’t flow like a comic book. What you get is a white boxed border around the screen to simulate a comic panel while some Premiere transitions flip and zoom behind it. It’s really weird and never quite works, especially when things get zoomed in and the minimal text used gets really distorted.
Then there are the weapons in the game. Everything feels the same and the shotgun feels exactly like your pistol, without any weight to each. The only difference is that some weapons fire faster than others. The muzzle animation is the same across them all as well as the audio being the same too. Shooting your pistol and shooting your shotgun is the same because they use the same audio sample.
Later stages to mix up the design almost too much at points (going from basic robbers to revived Nazi zombies is a big leap) and tweak the boss fights, but none of this is enough to really make British Gangsters feel like anything other than a game put together during a weekend game jam. If that were the case I would praise the effort and want to see it developed into a complete game, but that just didn’t seem to happen in this case.
At best I can say British Gangsters feels like a decent mobile game, and at worst I can say that it’s a cheap end-of-year cash-grab. Thankfully the game is only selling for $2.99 and I do think that’s a fair price for what is being offered, so the publishers know what it has here. It just seems weird that such an under-cooked game was worked on by two separate development studios and has two separate publishers.
British Gangsters is a game I’d “wish-list” and pick up when you want something arcade-like to cleanse the palette from whatever you’ve got yourself lost in. There is something here, I just wish it was developed into something more substantial. And if the game does come to a mobile device in the future, I’d totally recommend it for a few bucks in that form without hesitation. For now, go find a Time Crisis machine and have some fun.
British Gangsters has potential as a quirky 1960s homage to Time Crisis but ends up feeling like a weekend created game jam runner up.
Final Score: 2/5
Genre: Action, Adventure, Casual, Indie
Developer: Blackpixel Studio, YS Interactive
Publisher: Zeppelin Entertainment, Plug In Digital
Platform: PC (Steam)
Release Date: Dec 17, 2019
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