Alekhine's Gun

My honest reaction after a few hours with Alekhine's Gun was a genuine mix of curiosity and disappointment. The premise actually lands well: you play as Semyon Strogov, a KGB operative running covert ops for the CIA across eleven missions spanning Cold War flashpoints in Cuba, New York, Florida, Norway, Germany, and Austria, plus a handful of World War II flashback levels. That is a solid sandbox on paper, and the third-person social-stealth loop, steal uniforms, strangle guards, poison drinks, plant evidence, feels like it could have been a tight budget alternative to Hitman's classic era. The trouble is that almost every system in the game is broken or half-finished. The AI is the worst offender: guards operate on basic cone-of-sight detection, and if a higher-ranked enemy spots your disguise, you can defeat the scan by literally turning around and staring at a wall. The same guards who catch you lock-picking a door will shrug and walk away without raising an alarm. There is no autosave, so forty-minute runs can vanish if you forget to manually save. Cutscenes cannot be skipped, they are barely-animated greyscale sketches, and the voice acting is difficult to sit through. Performance tanks in any open or crowded area despite the visuals looking like a mid-2000s engine build. What Alekhine's Gun does get right, in its rare good moments, is atmosphere and structural ambition. The Cold War setting is genuinely interesting, the mission locations are varied, and the multi-path level design occasionally gives you the satisfying freedom to poison a drink, switch a uniform, or garrote someone in a stairwell and drag the body to a closet. There is a focus mode to assist with the slippery gunplay, a disguise-free difficulty option for players who want more of a shooter experience, and a post-mission grading system that tracks bodies found, times spotted, and civilian kills. Those bones show that someone at Haggard Games understood what made this genre appealing. The context matters here too. This game started life as Death to Spies 3, a troubled project that failed two separate crowdfunding attempts before a publisher rebranded it and rushed it out. The seams show. Core mechanics that the Death to Spies series once handled adequately, like vehicle interaction and broader stealth options, were reportedly stripped out. What shipped feels like an early build caught in a time warp, technically closer to a last-generation title than anything released in 2016. If a clean kill or a perfectly executed disguise swap occasionally clicks, there is a ghost of something likeable in there, but it is surrounded by bugs, broken physics, ragdoll corpses with no weight, and level design that sometimes forces loud gunfights in a game that grades you on silent runs. Skip this unless you are a committed fan of social stealth who wants to see how the Death to Spies lineage ended up, or you find it at a very steep discount and have already exhausted Hitman Blood Money and Contracts. Everyone else should spend that time on those originals instead.

Alex · Scout Team

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