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Living in Chicago nowadays is a veritable nightmare, with gangs roaming the streets and thugs lining the alleyways, but as bad as it is now, nothing can compare with the frightening days of Al Capone, prohibition, and the St. Valentines day massacre. There have been many films to illustrate the subject and the horror that went on, but there are very few computer games with that theme. US Gold has decided to rectify that fact with the aid of Spanish software house Toposoft, and quite a novel software title it is too.

You are the blue-eyed boy of the force, Elliot (I wonder where they got that name from? Well it wasn't from ET, that's for sure!), who has shouldered the responsibility of cleaning the streets of Chicago singlehandedly. The right way to do this (and who are you to alter the methods of law enforcement!) is by eradicating an illegal alcohol warehouse, which is at the end of four rather difficult levels of play.

To stop you, there are literally hundreds of bad guys, just waiting to fill that puny body of yours full of lead (and they don't stab you with pencils, either!) They also throw petrol bombs and drive cars over your carcass (why else would they be called bad guys?).

Another note is they they seem to stream from every point of the screen, and therefore death awaits in many directions.

There are four levels of play (as already stated) made up of the port, the city outskirts, the city, and finally the warehouse itself and they all get progressively harder.

Luckily you do have a Thompson machine gun with which you can mutilate any of those difficult enemies, and it is a good idea to constantly use it because the game is so hard.

The difficulty level is the game's major burden as it is far too hard to be playable. The amount of enemies that you have to wade through is terrible, especially seeing as you only start with four lives. The sprite detection is completely useless, with bullets that seem to have seemingly passed beneath or above you, suddenly sucking a life away.

The graphics are rather well presented, although they could be described as a mite gaudy, in the form of a cinema screen, and the lives left for your character are displayed as viewers sitting down watching the action (as you die, they leave!). Chicago 30's would have been a very good game if it had an error or two less, but those errors build up and make for an unenjoyable game and a pointless purchase.