Parent's Guide: Alekhine's Gun - Age rating, mature content and difficulty

What is Alekhine's Gun?

Alekhine's Gun is a stealth oriented third person game, where you play as an assassin in the midst of the Cold War. Tasked with going undercover to take out various targets, it's up to you to keep your head down, and blend in, until you can get your target alone - before doing the deed, and getting out of there.

How do you play Alekhine's Gun?

As a game with a heavy emphasis on stealth, a large part of Alekhine's Gun revolves around staying hidden, as you try to get to your target without raising the alarm. How you achieve this is mostly up to you. If you take a more pacifist approach, you can simply sneak around while no-one else is looking, timing your movements carefully - or, if you want to take a more direct route, you could always kill (or knock out) a guard, a butler, or a serviceman, and steal their uniform, letting you walk around freely with no questions asked - so long as you don't get too close to other people, anyway.

Once you've found your target, it's up to you to figure out how to quietly dispose of them, and then hide the body where no-one else will find it. There's a lot of emphasis on covering your tracks, staying hidden, and not doing anything that might make anyone suspicious.

How easy is Alekhine's Gun to pick up and play?

While the game does give you objectives, you're given a lot of freedom as to how you want to approach them. Often, you're simply told to kill a person, and you have to figure out who that is, where they are, and then how to get to them. That's a lot of hurdles for you to leap, and with several ways to complete each objective, how you do it is up to you. The level of freedom involved here makes the game more complex than other, more linear games - you rarely have anything telling you you're doing the "right" thing, and instead have to rely almost entirely on your initiative and experimentation.

While there is a compass showing you where you need to go next (which is handy for finding targets), it doesn't always tell you everything you need to know. For example, if your target is upstairs, you may find you need a pass to be allowed to use the lift - and it's up to you to figure out where to find it.

To help make things a little bit easier, there's a variety of difficulty levels on offer, and on the easiest difficulty levels, it's not too hard to pull the wool over guards' eyes - especially if you're wearing their uniform. You can also save wherever you want, which makes the game a lot less punishing. However, purely due to the amount of freedom here, and the general lack of any real pointers, this is a game for those who like a challenge.

As you're playing as an assassin, Alekhine's Gun understandably features plenty of violence, some of it up close. When it comes to taking people out, you have a number of options at your fingers - you can choke them out with chloroform; strangle them with a garrote; or simply shoot them with a range of weapons, from pistols to sniper rifles. You also have access to poison. That said, while the subject matter may be a bit grisly, Alekhine's Gun isn't as gory as you may imagine. Your garrote, for example, doesn't leave a mark around the neck; the noises people make when you're choking them out aren't as stomach curdling as in some games; and if you're not using guns, there isn't much in the way of blood. Even if you do go for a more trigger happy approach, the gore isn't that bad, with the odd slight red mist coming out of your enemies - there's no decapitations or dismemberment. You also have the option to choke your enemy out with your hands, or stab them, but again, it's all over very quickly without giving you a long, drawn out close up like in other games - you just stab them a few times quickly and it's over.

 There's also nothing in the way of sexual content here, and bad language is mild at worst, with the odd "s**t" being as bad as it gets.

Age Ratings

Format Reviewed: Playstation 4