I’d not played the first episode of Blues and Bullets. I had to dive around a friend’s house for a few hours and kidnap his PC to give it a whirl. TO be honest, I’m damn glad I did. Blues and Bullets is quite different to anything I’ve played recently and in a good way.
Which is convenient as I have episode 2 to review. The story continues in grand fashion with ‘hero’ Elliot Ness continuing the search for Al Capone’s missing granddaughter. The best part being is that there is pretty much nothing wrong with this episode. Some pacing issues occur but overall you have another mysterious and engrossing episode.
One of the major differences in this episode is a lot more time is spent in flashback fleshing out Elliot, giving the player some understanding of the guilt he feels for his colleague’s death. The present day is a lot more high paced, with Capone carelessly screwing up plans to offset the softer pace of the flashbacks. This gives Elliot a lot more of a flawed human feel, making him overall a more relatable character.
The same range of gameplay styles are still about. You can chew the fat with plenty of dialogue. You can investigate an area, looking for clues to piece together the events which occurred. You can shoot the hell out of goons and thugs while running through corridors to your safety to change the pace up as well. This is where the pacing issues become a bit obvious. The two shooting sections in this game feel quite drawn out, forcing length in where it isn’t required. Unlike in episode 1 where the shooting felt like a nice change of pace they are made to feel tedious and repetitive.
A nice addition to the gameplay roster is the basic-yet-horrific exploration scenes. These allow you to see the decisions made in episode 1 come to fruition in harrowing first-person. Episode 2 adds a further six of these decisions into the game and this adds hope to this being a recurring trait across later episodes, as it is used to great effect here.
Graphically, Blues and Bullets appears to have a little more polish in this episode, adding a strange, evocative and effective modern look to the overall film-noir effect of the game. The animation and lip syncing is still as haphazard-looking as the first episode and probably the only other niggle I can have with this game. Soundwise the game is as good and as bad as the first episode, with a great soundtrack but not-so-great vocals in some places.
In a nutshell, Blues and Bullets: Episode 2 is more of the same. When the focus is on the story the game is as stellar as episode 1. When the focus is on the shooting the game falls over, stretching the sections out slightly too long to be enjoyable, and probably explaining the runtime being slightly longer than episode 1. Few answers are given and more questions are added basically guaranteeing I will buy episode 3 the second it comes out. That’s high praise for a story-driven game, and earns itself a high 8 for its efforts.
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