Peaky Blinders: The King’s Ransom VR Review 6/10 "TV Tie-Ins Are Difficult Territory" 👒 @PeakyBlindersVR #IndieGame #GameDev

For those who don’t know, the BBC TV series Peaky Blinders is an international phenomenon. Set in Birmingham just after the first World War, it focuses on the titular street gang as they… well, I don’t know, do street gang stuff, presumably.

I don’t know because I’ve never watched it. I’ve seen it, but I haven’t watched it. The main reason for this is that I am a native of those lands, and after about 10 minutes of it, the accents grated on my nerves so much that I turned it off, never to watch it again. 

That’s not necessarily as harsh criticism as it sounds. Midlands accents are notoriously difficult to imitate, and whilst I’ve lost my ear for it since moving away, anyone from the area will tell you that it’s entirely possible to tell where someone was from with startling accuracy, just from accent alone. 

Anyway, I digress – although it is important to bear in mind that I am not overly familiar with the source material. I’ll be reviewing the game from the perspective of a newcomer. Perhaps familiarity with the series would make the game more compelling, so bear that in mind if you’re considering buying it. 

VR games tend to be rated on “comfort”, and that’s where we’ll start. VR is by nature immersive, and that can mess with your senses. Particularly, movement can be an issue. Your eyes are telling you that you’re moving but the rest of you says you aren’t, and for some reason, human physiology translates that into “I should probably be sick now”.

Developers Maze Theory has employed two approaches to combat this issue. The first is familiar to VR gamers: teleportation. You aim the stick, placing the target where you want to go, and then boom – you appear there, cleverly sidestepping the potential to introduce your lunch to your shoes.

The other is more subtle, and that’s narrowing the field of vision slightly (think horse blinders rather than Peaky Blinders), which does a remarkably good job of reducing the feeling of nausea by reducing the movement in your peripheral vision. No sick bags are required. 

Moving on to the control scheme, it’s standard fare in VR. Left stick to move, right to teleport and to snap your turns in a similar way to the teleporting movement. Grip buttons hold things, trigger buttons shoot. Nice and simple. 

Onto the experience itself. The game opens on your character being transported to see the big boss: Tommy Shelby, who is voiced by Cillian Murphy, the actor from the show. This section introduces you to movement, interacting with objects and doors, and so on. Once your meeting is over, you’re off to decide the fate of a kidnapped man in the next room. Kill him, or don’t. In the demo I played, there’s no indication of whether or not this has any impact on the story later. 

The game conveys the feeling of the locations well. Having grown up in the Midlands, it feels…familiar. A lot of that old architecture is still around in places, and Maze Theory have nailed it here. However, and I’m not sure if this is perhaps a hardware limitation, it somehow feels a little empty, with few characters dotted around. 

The game feels very linear. There are some collectibles lying around that you can grab if you explore a bit, but that exploration is very limited. Unless you’re working on the task at hand, you very quickly get the feeling that the game is waiting for you to get on with it. Buildings aren’t huge and complex, there aren’t roads you can wander too far on. 

I felt there were a couple of areas for improvement. Firstly, whilst the navigation is fine and dandy, some of the environment interaction could be a bit fiddly. Doors didn’t always react to being pulled open. Items such as the bomb-defusing pliers in an early part of the game either sat awkwardly in the character’s hand, or on some occasions, mysteriously disappeared and had to be retrieved.

Whilst the game explains environmental interaction fairly well, there were a couple of points where I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing, and eventually worked it out on my own. There’s a scene in a pub which encapsulates what I’m trying to articulate fairly well. On the way to the pub, you’re blocked. Until after a while you realise through experimentation that you can move some crates blocking your path. When you get there there’s an NPC waiting outside. But when he started talking, he had his back to me, as if I was supposed to be somewhere else. After a while we head into the pub to build some bombs and have a drink.

The bomb parts fell all over the place and for the life of me I couldn’t put one down successfully. The bottle was the same. After a while there’s a fire in the pub. The main NPC buggers off and you’re left to deal with it.

Cue: Wandering around a burning building for a good 5 minutes or so until you work out how to progress. These aren’t game-breaking bugs by any stretch of the imagination, but a bit of polish on them wouldn’t go amiss as they break the immersion that these kinds of games strive for. 

There’s some perfunctory combat in the game. The reload mechanic (grab a clip that’s lying around, slam it into the grip of the pistol) is fairly gratifying, but aiming is a bit of a random affair and not enormously engaging. But then, I don’t think this game is aimed at hardcore FPS players, so it’s probably fine. 

At the end of the day, TV tie-ins are difficult territory. You don’t have real freedom with character development, just in case you come up with something that isn’t canon or kill off a character.

And as I said above, it’s a very different target market to something like Escape From Tarkov. And as someone who isn’t a fan of the show, while this was a relatively enjoyable way to spend some time, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was locked in the Black Country Living Museum after hours. With bad accents.

If maybe the NPCs turned to face me when I was in the “wrong” place, or if they had additional dialogue to offer when I was clearly baffled at what to do next, this might have helped. 

SUMMARY

This game didn’t blow me away, but as I’ve taken pains to point out, I don’t know the source material.

There are certainly no game breaking issues to report, but it doesn’t set the world on fire either.

However, if you’re a fan of the show, I think you’ll enjoy the opportunity to be immersed in some familiar scenery with your favourite characters, and to play out a little episode of your own for a couple of hours.