Milanoir is an homage to 1970s action cinema

With a focus on 1970s exploitation film aesthetics, Milanoir is a 2D, pixel-based shooter from Italian studio Italo Games.
 
In Milanoir, players take the role of a man recently released from prison who embarks on a crusade to find and punish the person who framed him. As a neologism that combines the city “Milan” with the film genre “noir,” Milanoir tells a dark story of sex, violence, and vengeance over the course of seven chapters.
 
Heavily inspired by the same 1970s action movies that inspired filmmaker Quentin Tarantino, Milanoir emphasizes that era’s style, music, and action as players blast their way through the mean streets of Milan.
 
“We put a lot of effort in the game’s music and the story,” says the game’s writer and designer Emmanuele Tornusciolo.
 
I got to play a large chunk of the game’s beginning, which starts with a prologue that introduces the game’s protagonist through a clever twist. The protagonist has an appropriate swagger that translates even to his sprite’s walking pattern.
 
After that, I headed to a brothel to look for one of the game’s villains, a woman named Africana. Hunting her provided the main goal during the demo I played. During this early brothel section, I was able to choke out unaware opponents as I made my way from floor to floor of the building. For the most part, though, Milanoir is a straight-up shooter.
 
Once gunplay was introduced, I was able to control a reticle with the right thumb stick independent of my character movement. The reticle control was a little sloppy, and it’s evident that the game was developed with a computer mouse in mind. Using a mouse, I’m sure it would work much better. For console controllers it would have been nice to have a twin stick shooter control scheme option.

 
When the firefights start, players have to dive for cover. Holding the left trigger allows players to crouch behind cover like boxes and potted plants. This is important since players die after only three hits. When taking damage, the edges of the screen start to corrode like old film burning. If players stay in cover long enough, their health will start to recover.
 
As I left the brothel area, the game introduced another mechanic: the ability to ricochet bullets off street signs to kill enemies. Different street signs have different effects on bullets. Some ricochet the bullet while others will split the bullet to hit multiple enemies.
 
Eventually, I found myself in a high speed car chase on the streets of Milan. However, this section emphasized the game’s difficulty since there was no longer any cover to hide behind.
 
Luckily, the game features a dedicated coop mode that somewhat alleviates the game’s difficulty. The only caveat is that if one of you die, you both die.
 
Right now, the game is only scheduled to hit the PC, although Italo Games is talking with Nintendo about the game possibly coming to the Switch in the future.
 
Milanoir releases on Steam sometime in late 2017.

John Vanderhoef appears courtesy of the lovely people at GameCritics.com – this article may also be published there, so go check the site out!