If you are somebody who pines for video game/TV crossovers then you would have probably been pleased to hear about Peaky Blinders: Mastermind. Ignoring the rare success of games like these, the crime drama’s historical setting allowed for an already intriguing place to set a game.
Being touted as a puzzle-adventure game which will see the player control and pull off perfectly timed heists, Mastermind sounded like a decent foray into its source material. A puzzle game may not immediately appeal to those who are invested in the hardy criminal characters of the show but with Steven Knight (creator of the show) being involved with the game and the prequel storyline involving most of the shows favourite characters – there was every reason to be optimistic.
Don’t F*** with the Whom?
Peaky Blinders: Mastermind follows the Shelby family as they try to increase their power over the Small Heath area of Birmingham; battling with rival families and other problems along the way. The story sections are present before each of the game’s ten levels and play out as hand painted scenes with dialogue accompanying them.
Whilst the artwork of these beloved characters and locations is good, the dialogue unfortunately brings the cinematic quality down a few pegs. The absence of voice acting or even actor imitation is noticeable but is not the issue. The issue is just how boring everything reads – the dialogue is very plainly written and none of these characters have any personality when they speak. If it wasn’t for the character busts or names, it would be very hard to distinguish who was saying what.
Not having voice acting is not an issue for me at all, I love reading dialogue and applying the voices in my head, but it was impossible to do so with the quality of writing on offer here.
The poor writing isn’t helped by the lacklustre and unoriginal story arcs either. With the gameplay orientated more so around tactics and strategy, a lot rides on what is told to the player beforehand in these hand-painted scenes, and without any exciting story beats, it causes the game to fall flat before you have even played it.
Tommy the Timelord
Where the game falls so tremendously short is also where it makes some good strides. The mechanics are based around timing your actions between multiple characters to allow progression.
To do this, the player has access to a timeline which tracks any actions you perform such as opening a door or pulling a lever; and giving you the ability to rewind or fast forward time and control any other characters to do whatever is necessary against those actions.
Changing characters is done via the D-pad and rewinding with the triggers. At first it can be overwhelming, especially towards the later chapters. But the UI is designed well enough to give you good visual cues on what you are doing.
You then progress through levels using a variety of characters, each with different abilities to help everyone to the objective. Ada can distract enemies, allowing other characters to move past; Tommy can persuade NPCs to open doors or pull levers and Finn can crawl through small passages and openings.
All of these abilities allow you to do a specific action and then rewind time to control the other characters, whilst those actions play out in real time.
That’s the Thing About Time…
Implementing this core mechanic meant that the game itself can be an absolute terror to play at times. Trivial things like opening doors or switching characters feels tiresome as you normally must do everything for an extended amount of time, allowing yourself more time to play as the other characters.
For example, every time I opened a door for another character locked on the other side, I would have to hold down the open button for a few seconds before switching to the other character and walking through the open door. Otherwise the door would shut before I had time to walk through.
These kinds of irritating moments piled up throughout my playthrough and even when the game ramps up in its variety towards the end, I never felt I could enjoy it because everything felt finicky and difficult.
Too Little, Too Late
When you get to the final few missions, Peaky Blinders: Mastermind decides to take off the stabilisers and unleash the whole game to you. Being able to control a full team and play around with all their abilities together, offers a less linear and more exciting way to play the game.
My immediate thoughts after completing the last few missions was that I wished the game was like this the entire time. I hadn’t realised it at first, but the first 4 hours or so of the game, is basically a tutorial leading up to the last couple of missions.
The Verdict
Peaky Blinders: Mastermind clearly has some very talented people working on its systems and mechanics, but the tie into a massive dramatic TV series places it on a pedestal that it simply can’t deal with. The story is flat, the characters unrecognisable in all ways but visual and the gameplay is just not fun or satisfying enough for 80% of the game.
There is a great puzzle/strategy mechanic to explore here which is clear from the final missions of the game, which leaves me hoping for it to be reimplemented and tidied up slightly with a different direction. Ultimately though as a Peaky Blinders video game, it falls short of the mark in pretty much every way.
