Posted on: May 18, 2022
DebbieL
Games: Reviews: 8
Not as good as its predecessors.
I love the idea of this game: 'Desperados' set in 1930s gangland Chicago, with the added bonus of 2 separate campaigns (one for the Mafia and one for the FBI). Sadly, when I played it on Steam a few years ago, I found the game does not live up to its potential. Chicago 1930 is made by the same developers as 'Desperados' and 'Robin Hood: Legend of Sherwood', but feels like an early 1st draft of those games despite having a later release date. It's extremely buggy for starters - you can't assign equipment to any agents other than the team you start with, and I had to replay an entire mission in the FBI campaign after an important event failed to trigger. (I don't know if any bugs have been fixed for the GOG release.) It's also missing numerous QOL features from the earlier games, such as enemy vision cones, object highlighting and the ability to look through keyholes. Technical issues might be forgivable, but unfortunately the gameplay is lacking as well. Where Desperados gives you a 6-man squad with unique abilities, forcing you to use them together in clever ways, C1930 has a bunch of generic characters with very similar basic attributes - meaning you're unlikely to need more than 1 or 2 of them to play through most missions. It's also much more difficult to adopt a stealthy approach to gameplay, particularly in the Mafia missions (some of which will outright force you to massacre everyone). One of the FBI missions explicitly tells you to avoid a particular area where enemies have set up an ambush - but guess what you have to do in order to complete the mission? On the plus side, the atmosphere is great and the maps are beautiful and detailed. It's nice to have the ability (as the Feds) to arrest enemies rather than kill them, making a 'pacifist run' much more plausible. Chicago 1930 is probably worth a try if you're a big fan of Spellbound's games, though you should be prepared for copious bugs and a lot of frustration.
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