32.4 hours played
Written 29 days ago
---{ Graphics }---
☐ You forget what reality is
☐ Beautiful
☐ Good
☐ Decent
☑ Bad
☐ Don‘t look too long at it
☐ MS-DOS
You will get flashbanged by almost every light source at night. It's so bad that it messes up the gameplay mechanics (hides outlines of guards/camera areas). This is with the bloom effect off, by the way. During the day it's not that annoying, but this time the outlines of cameras, objectives, guards, detection notifications, etc. is not visible enough. Other graphics are mediocre, but the lights in the game make it so unbearable to play.
---{ Gameplay }---
☐ Very good
☐ Good
☐ It's just gameplay
☑ Mehh
☐ Watch paint dry instead
☐ Just don't
As the game title says, you go in houses to steal some stuff. It has story missions where you progress to new houses and side missions to make money to buy new tools. At the start it was good. You were learning different types of lock-picking styles, safe cracking, and new types of ways to enter the houses without triggering alarms, like using a glass knife to not trigger window alarms. It was actually somewhat fun, but it goes downhill when you progress further. There were 2 main problems;
1# When you learn how to hack. Hacking is a normal water pipe puzzle "mini-game." This is where the "mini-game" becomes the actual gameplay. If you need to open an electrical door, garage gate, or deactivate cameras and security, it's going to be a water pipe mini-game. The worst part is one level had 3 of these "mini-games" and nothing else. It wasn't even one of the endgame levels. Also, if you get caught, you have to redo them again. It becomes so repetitive and boring too fast.
2# The endgame mission/DLC designs were too lazy. I don't remember when was my first playthrough was but it was around on release so they were only 2 acts with total of 20 houses. On my second playthrough, they added a new act to play with 8 new houses and a new thief tool, which is a goddamn "hacking" laptop so you can "hack" remotely. So there is more of that core gameplay of that fun "mini-game." Even if we ignore the "mini-game," the laptop only hacks the closest one and doesn't tell us what it hacks too. So you waste your time on things that you didn't even want to hack. Let's also ignore all the hacking laptop "minigame BS and talk about the last act design. It's too empty. In the first acts, there were AI's driving cars and walking around streets that can call the police if you do get caught doing something shady. In the last act, there are none. I assume the AI pathing was buggy, so they removed it in the last act. They also added a 4th act for DLCs, but it was too buggy and even lazier designed levels. I will go into more details on bugs later on in this review, but the free DLC missions (I didn't play the priced ones) were soo basic that I thought I was playing the tutorial again. After spending almost 5-10 minutes on a very hard missions I was expecting somewhat same but most levels I didn't even need of any tools steal everything on most of the levels. They introduce new tools to use, like bolt cutters, but you only use them for 1-2 missions once and never after that.
Other than this main problem, there are some quality problems. Time skipping, using the computer to sell/buy stuff, starting the car, etc. have too long animations. You have to exit the car to drive it again after skipping time. There is no unstuck button for the car and other small things that can be fixed with a small quality-of-life update.
---{ Audio }---
☐ Eargasm
☐ Very good
☐ Good
☑ Not too bad
☐ Bad
☐ I'm now deaf
They didn't spend too much time on audio either. There is only one radio station that plays 2-3 songs, one stealth song, one pursuit/chase song. It gets repetitive, but its not bad either.
---{ Audience }---
☐ Kids
☑ Teens
☑ Adults
☑ Grandma
---{ PC Requirements }---
☐ Check if you can run paint
☐ Potato
☑ Decent
☐ Fast
☐ Rich boi
☐ Ask NASA if they have a spare computer
10 year old PCs can run it without a problem.
---{ Game Size }---
☐ Floppy Disk
☐ Old Fashioned
☑ Workable
☐ Big
☐ Will eat 15% of your 1TB hard drive
☐ You will want an entire hard drive to hold it
☐ You will need to invest in a black hole to hold all the data
11.3 GB without DLCs
---{ Difficulty }---
☐ Just press 'W'
☑ Easy
☐ Easy to learn / Hard to master
☐ Significant brain usage
☐ Difficult
☐ Dark Souls
It's easy but time consuming. You have to find the optimal route to steal stuff and get away with it. That's it.
---{ Grind }---
☐ Nothing to grind
☐ Only if u care about leaderboards/ranks
☐ Isn't necessary to progress
☐ Average grind level
☑ Too much grind
☐ You'll need a second life for grinding
In order to progress in story missions, you need to level up. In order to level up, you need to steal more stuff. With side missions, it's not that big of a deal if your aim is to finish missions and/or story. If you want to do all your achievements, it gets very tricky. Some achievements, like Halloween and Christmas achievements, are very repetitive and time-specific. You can do them by changing the time in your system, but you have to revisit all the houses again to do them twice. It takes a bit time do those
---{ Story }---
☑ No Story
☐ Some lore
☐ Average
☐ Good
☐ Lovely
☐ It'll replace your life
---{ Game Time }---
☐ Long enough for a cup of coffee
☐ Short
☑ Average
☐ Long
☐ To infinity and beyond
My last playthrough is just over 10 hours, so it has around 7-8 hours of gameplay in one story with sidequests including Halloween and Christmas events.
---{ Price }---
☐ It's free!
☐ Worth the price
☐ If it's on sale
☑ If u have some spare money left
☐ Not recommended
☐ You could also just burn your money
There are not that many stealth modern-era theft games. Most of them are either medieval era or fantasy RPGs. There are some stealth missions on PAYDAY 1-2 that have a better level design than this game, so if you haven't played any PAYDAY game series, go play it first. If you specifically want this type of theme to play, then it may be worth your time, but I prefer to wait for sales.
---{ Bugs }---
☐ Never heard of
☐ Minor bugs
☑ Can get annoying
☐ ARK: Survival Evolved
☐ The game itself is a big terrarium for bugs
The more you progress, the more bugs appear. At the start, there are minor visual bugs that won't affect the game that much, like main/side quest objective markers standing still after you have done them or move the item. In the final act and DLC, it becomes a cluster show. Police teleport out of nowhere, getting zapped by a stun gun through a wall from the other side of the map, items/Guards falling into the abyss, invisible walls, walls with no collision, phasing into walls/gates after leaving the car, AI paths stuck in one place, duplicated guards, and even more. There is also a way to soft-lock your save file if you are not careful enough. There is no manual save or multiple save files. Just one profile save that automatically saves when you leave the area by driving out of the level, resting or leaving the car. If you phase into a wall/gate after you leave your car, you can get stuck and every time you load the save file you will start as stuck. I got stuck like this once, but luckily there is a command that makes you unstuck (which should be a button on the menu, not a hidden command). But if you imagine getting stuck inside a house perimeter in front of a guard, then say goodbye because every time you load your save you will get zapped by a stun gun with a game over screen. This happening at the end of the can get very annoying.
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====OVERALL====
35/100
-30 = Too much major bugs
-25 = Too repetitive
-10 = Bad levels
Towards mid to end, game becomes a hacker who plays this stupid water-pipe puzzle "mini-game" on his laptop instead of other game mechanics given at the start. Gets very buggy that may cause softlock. Level design become very empty and repetitive.
