The main campaign is made up of six missions with various stages which take you through various environments like deep jungles and weapon facilities. Choosing between four weapons and a handful of grenades, you’ll have to kill a lot of enemies. The pistol is a simple weapon to use, however, it won’t cut the mustard when you’re facing down burly men wielding grenade launchers or helicopters. The submachine gun has an unbalanced spread of bullets, but as long as you’re pointing it in their general direction, you’ll be fine.

The other two weapons on Operation Wolf Returns: First Mission require two hands to hold, but I found the shotgun to be clumsy and pretty useless. Meant for close combat, I was rarely near enemies without more breathing down my neck. You don’t feel comfortable using it as at times there can be a lot of enemies shooting at you, making the assault rifle a much better choice. I seldom used anything else because it was the most effective. You can throw grenades into swarths of soldiers for quick bouts of destruction, too.

By killing enemies, you’ll earn more ammo, and there’re also various chickens and pigs that can be shot at to bag yourself a few more rounds, ammo vest, or first aid kit. Hostages are also scattered around the jungle, and by blasting off the cabin doors, you’ll free them to earn a first aid kit. Exploding barrels can be fired at for a nice explosion, and some enemies will drop special weapons in the form of a rocket launcher and grenade launcher.

There were other cool moments that pop up and mix up the gunplay, such as a stationary rail gun. Enemy soldiers come out you from the sky, sneaking around a building or from a local barracks. There are tanks, helicopters, and even boss fights at the end of each stage, always providing a challenge or two. The on-rails nature of combat is smooth and lacked any kind of motion sickness for me, and the difficulty didn’t tend to put an end to my run. Even if you do die, continues throw you right back into the action. All in all, Operation Wolf Returns: First Mission is fun as hell, albeit a tad repetitive and far too short.

You can obviously replay the campaign to get a better rank which is based off how good your combo kills are, how many first aid kits you use, and how much damage you take. I rarely dipped below an A rank, but the difficulty can be changed if you so wish. The only other mode is a survival mode where you pick a stage and fight off hordes of enemies until you die. There’s not a lot to do outside of this, but if you’re looking for something simple and quick, it might be worth a go.

Operation Wolf Returns: First Mission is a basic on-rails shooter, but its gunplay is pretty decent despite the shotgun being a little redundant. It’s too short and there’s little to do beyond the campaign and survival mode, yet it kept me interested. The story is daft and never takes itself seriously, but I found that refreshing as it was all about the chaos and gunfire. It tries to mix things up as it goes, and the easy controls make it a good jump in and play type of game.

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You play a deserter from His Majesty’s army who has come to the oily back alleys of 1920’s Birmingham to join up with the Peaky Blinders. Led by Tommy Shelby and his quick-to-anger brother Arthur, the gang is already notorious at this point, well known as the true power on the streets of Brum. Through some massive bad luck, you end up embroiled in a plot to steal Winston Churchill’s Red Box, a briefcase which just happens to contain the names of all of Britain’s currently active spies. As you can imagine, there’s a lot of factions looking for this, and getting to it first will go a long way to securing your place as a Blinder.

Anyone familiar with the TV series will likely go in with preconceived notions, and for once I’d encourage you to do so. Peaky Blinders is one of the best crime dramas of the last ten years, with Cillian Murphy, Paul Anderson and the late, greatly missed Helen McRory turning in what many consider to be career-best performances as the primary trio. It’s a powerful show, often incredibly raw in its storytelling and fearless in its execution, dealing with a myriad of issues from classism, alcoholism, PTSD, misogyny and terrorism. But it’s also a very human show, presenting flawed, emotionally-challenged characters who ultimately do what they have to in order to survive.

The King’s Ransom does what it can with the source material, which is not the damning indictment it sounds like. It’s more a comment on the limitations of the tech. Sitting opposite Tommy Shelby in the Garrison Pub feels as atmospheric as you’d want it to, with the sounds of the pub around you, a glass of the good stuff in your digital hand. And the voice work is absolutely solid throughout. But everything is working against the visuals to maintain this atmosphere.

Characters animate like an early PS3 game, their dead-eyed stares and bizarre mannerisms betraying them at every turn. You can interact with a surprising number of items from throwing darts to writing on walls or chalkboards, to, of course, using weapons and firearms, but you can’t interact directly with people. They just stand there and boggle at you while you try to poke and prod them. They sit glassy-eyed while you drop cigarettes on the carpet, spill booze everywhere as you try to pour one out, or chuck fruit at them to see what happens. While you’re engaged in a shoot out or even just moving through the environments, Peaky Blinders: The King’s Ransom is brilliant. But as soon as you have to interact with characters, the fact that none of it is real becomes massively apparent.

Which, of course, is hardly a fair criticism. The tech has limits that Maze Theory have done their best to overcome and in many ways they have. You can’t deny the awe you’ll feel as a fan of the show to walk into the Shelby’s betting operation, or listen to Arthur bellow obscenities a few feet away from you. Getting Cillian Murphy and Paul Anderson to sign on to this is a hell of a coup, as simply hearing the lines delivered in their voices is spectacular.

Thing is though, the game itself is overshadowed by its world. I’m not the best when it comes to handling VR, and so I appreciated the fact that I could play the whole game sitting down with teleport controls. But this meant that during shootouts, and particularly in high-intensity moments, I struggled a little with inertia. Teleport movement is a great option, but doesn’t exactly convey realism. That said, little touches work really well, such as the instant-snap reloading and being able to stow key items by letting go of them. Your journal, too, which contains all your important mission and character info, is conveniently stored in an invisible bag over your shoulder.

Like most good VR games, Peaky Blinders: The King’s Ransom is at its very best when it’s not leading you by the hand through slightly rote objectives. Every time it let’s stop to piss about with the environment it gets better. An early example of this is when you can sit in the very first area and okay VR darts for hours. You get nothing for it but an achievement but it made me want a full on VR darts game right away. Likewise, locations like the aforementioned Garrison Pub feel authentic, and even though you’re being talked at by a mannequin-like Cillian Murphy, you can’t deny the sheer sense of place.

Even as the story gathers pace and you move from lowly street runner to a key player in the gang, the most impressive moments are when you’re just doing VR stuff in VR. Some of the side objectives are a bit dull, and will see you ferrying info or goods to and fro through various rundown streets, none of which wow you as much as locations lifted from the show. Anytime you have to stop and listen to someone telling you what to do, it begins to lose its lustre.

For what it is, though, The King’s Ransom does a fantastic job. The limitations of the technology notwithstanding, it’s a great adventure game filled with iconic faces (sort of) and absolutely seething with menacing atmosphere. It’s just a shame that it suffers so much in visual terms and offers so little excitement outside of the main storyline. Still, it’s one of the better VR games of its genre and a total love letter to the BBC show. Bang Red Right Hand on in the background while you play, and Peaky Blinders: The King’s Ransom is a fan’s dream.

The post Peaky Blinders: The King’s Ransom review appeared first on GodisaGeek.com.

As it is, it’s a VR follow up to What the Golf?, and features you doing fairly mundane tasks via the medium of the baseball bat. So you’re making coffee for a trio of gunge cats, but you must move the cup with a bat. You’re feeding steaks to your dog, but with a high-velocity delivery system that involves launching them directly at its face.

So none of What the Bat’s world makes any sense, and that’s fine. But it also allows it to play games with your mind. For example, there are stages where you must set bowling balls in motion with a baseball bat, and the ball must travel around a horseshoe-shaped lane, avoiding bowling pins that move from side to side. It’s incredibly tough, or was, until I realised that the trophy I was trying to hit at the other end of the lane was beside me. It was as simple as ignoring the problem in front of me and finding the most direct solution.

Likewise there’s a stage that sees you checking out goods at a supermarket, and the final one is a giant horse. You’re presented a tin of black and white stripey paint, which I spent far too long trying to pick up and tip over the horse before I realised you could just dip the bat in and paint the damn thing. Simple solutions.

But equally, there are some incredibly fiddly activities that made me swear. Steering paper airplane with a huge joystick you have to “grip” with baseball bats is annoying. Though nothing outstay its welcome. Activities are over in minutes and you’re onto the next one, the downside of which is that you can rattle through everything on offer pretty quickly. New chapters are coming, which is a good thing because What the Bat has the potential to be super, super weird, and most of what’s here doesn’t lean quite weird enough.

Although, there are stages that need you to tune your TV using antenna strapped to your bats, or fix the plumbing in your bathroom using, well, you guessed it. There’s not a problem in this world that can’t be fixed by the liberal application of baseball bats.

Which makes it all the odder that my favourite moments were the ones where I just got to summon a baseball and smack it at things. There’s a simple catharsis to breaking stuff or knocking stuff over, and What the Bat is weirdly stingy with it. After a few stages spent swearing into the void while trying to put bread in a toaster with two wobbly, imprecise baseball bats strapped to your mitts, you’ll be crying out to belt a ball at some fucker’s face. The big blue elephant is present in most stages and he’s begging for a high-speed baseball up the trunk.

The aesthetic is colourful but very simple, low detail and mostly uncluttered. Which can also be said of the soundtrack, composed as it is of largely inoffensive background muzak.

Like What the Golf, What the Bat is all about the gameplay, and mostly hits the mark despite some genuine irritations. It’s far from repetitive, but I found myself longing for the simplicity of knocking trophies off shelves or tree branches versus trying to paint pictures with the end of a wooden bat, but maybe that says more about me than the game. I don’t even want to analyse why I felt an overpowering need to break every window I could see or why I spent so long trying to see if I could engineer a pile-up crash outside the cat cafe.

Either way, What the Bat is a decent craic if you’re just after a game to kill half an hour. It is fun, for the most part, and its inoffensive humour and variety make for a colourful and unpredictable play session every time.

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