This game is based on a British television series. It seems like a rather popular one and the final season is set to air soon but I’ve never watched it. I only bought this because I’m always curious about quirky little games and I liked the setting. The name itself refers to a family of gangsters based in Birmingham, England, set just after the end of the First World War. The gameplay is somewhat similar to Shadow Tactics, in that you need to coordinate a team to get through each level.

Unfortunately the game assumes that anyone playing it is already a fan of the show and so makes no effort to introduce the setting or the characters. The story here actually acts as a prequel to the show, beginning with some of the guys returning home from the war. As the gang celebrates their return by stealing some booze, they get into a conflict with a rival gang, the Gilroys. The Gilroys retaliate and the fight escalates and one of Peaky Blinders apparently kills a Chinese, angering the local Chinese community. Inevitably the police get involved let a police inspector who is unhappy about all these war veterans coming home to cause trouble. This is a pretty short game so there is not a lot of story to tell. Without being a fan of the show, it can be difficult to tell who’s who and why you should care about them. One complaint that crops up over and over again in the reviews is that there is no voice acting, only written text in the cutscenes. I agree as having the original actors voice the characters would have made a huge difference in the presentation. As it is, the story is decent but it’s hard to get worked up over what happens if you’re not already a fan.

Each level has you controlling the members of the gang, up to six characters by the end of the game, to accomplish a set of objectives. My favorite level for example has one team impede and obstruct a police inspector walking through the neighborhood while the other team tries to beat him to where he is going. The levels incorporate many simple puzzles familiar from other such games, such as doors that are controlled by a lever elsewhere for example so one character has to hold it down long enough for another character to pass through the door. There are also carts that can be moved to block a path or open one and doors that require keys to unlock and so on. Naturally each character also has their own particularities, the most basic of which is that the male characters must avoid being seen by guards while the two women can freely through their cones of vision. Finn is a little boy so he can crawl through holes in fences and windows and pickpocket items, while Arthur, the nominal head of the family is a big brute and so can fight and kick down weak doors.

One problem is that there is no biography page for each character that gives a bit of background information about them and reminds you of what they can do. For example only John can grab lanterns and throw them onto wooden objects to set them on fire. Of the two women, Ada can distract guards while Polly can bribe certain ones. It’s important to know what they can do as you plan their routes through the level. Still the game is rather easy especially as on normal difficulty you get colored waypoints to tell you where each character is meant to go. It can be a little daunting at the beginning as the levels can seem quite big and are full of life and detail but once you get yourself oriented, you can see that the path through each level is really quite linear. Your performance is rated according to how quickly you can clear a level and generally speaking it’s quite easy to get the gold award once you understand the layout of each level. That’s why this game doesn’t have much replay value at all.

My one big beef with this game is its user interface. It does warn you that it’s designed for controllers so playing with a mouse and keyboard isn’t optimal. But what this means is that you can’t select characters with a mouse and use point and click like in an RTS to send them to where you want them to go or click on an interactable object to get them to use it. Instead you must use the movement controls to direct the characters all over the map. This also means that even though the time needed to clear each level is really quite short, you have to relive the same span of time over and over again with the characters to direct them. Let’s say for example that you just need to get all six characters to walk from point A to point B and that takes, say, 5 seconds, you actually need to individually select each character and manually control them to walk for that 5 seconds. You can freely rewind and forward time as you deliberate these orders but of course once you change a saved sequence of orders all of the later ones are lost. I swear that the system for saving commands is a bit finicky sometimes. You might direct a character to move through a series of corners and that seems to work but then when you rewind and play back, that character unexpectedly gets stuck on a corner, It’s a real pain when the movements of all of the characters needs to be coordinated just so.

Apart from that, the game also feels lacking in that the puzzles feel simple and none too original. They’re also not terribly appropriate for the setting. Why would the gates in the sewer tunnels under the city in early 20th-century Britain be controlled by levers? That said I do love the art design and the look of the city in the game and I love the idea of a game in this setting. If only the soundscape of the city with voices and all were as good. Combined with the lightweight gameplay and the annoying interface, I can’t really recommend this at all as something like Shadow Tactics is so much better in comparison. But if you are a fan of a show I can see how this might be worthwhile especially as it serves as a prequel to the series proper.