So I've beaten the primary campaign in Monaco, and about half of the "remix campaign," and I'm not so sure it's all that good of a game after all. It's got amazing style and flair and it's easy to get blinded, but the more time you spend with it and the harder the game gets, the more frustrating it all becomes and it often feels like you're playing a crude proto-stealth game from 1987, which is just frustrating. How is there no "knock on wall" or "kick over trash" button to lure enemies with? Come on!
Pros:
- Amazing visual style that's not just about the blocky pixels; the guys have great eyes for color and they do some neat things with the style they created. My favorite part is the backdrops for the "cutscenes," some of them look awesome.
- The light/shadow effects are insanely good.
- Creative and cool soundtrack.
- Simplistic gameplay that just works - contextual one-button gameplay that works perfectly.
Cons:
- They've gone too far with the light dynamic, and it's too strict. You lose sight of everything too easily and quickly and it's basically impossible to know what's hiding around a corner. Of course, they don't have to employ the third-person stealth mechanic of abusing the camera to know things you shouldn't, but it also shouldn't be completely impossible to know if there's an entire army behind a door or not. Humans have other senses than sight and that's not reflected in this game whatsoever. There's a tiny, tiny audio portion to it, where you can hear/see footsteps of guards that are very close to you but it's not very useful.
- Guards act too realistically. I mean, yes, it makes sense for them to thoroughly search every corner after an alarm has been tripped, and it makes sense for them to be on high alert for a very long time afterwards... But it's not fun. At all. I'm not going to behave any differently just because the alarm is up for longer than it typically is in a stealth game; all that leads to is me sitting in that little bush for 5 minutes longer than I should have to, as I click around on shit on my laptop and wait for the stressful music to subside. I guess the idea is that the more you mess up and get seen, the harder the level becomes as it all stacks and you create more weary guards as you screw up more, but that's not how it plays out. Any halfway decent gamer is just going to wait it out.
- There's too few tools at your disposal, and the character abilities and level powerups don't really close some of those gaps. There really should've been a way to distract guards to move them from their post; for example, why can't I interact with the phones? There are phones that will ring randomly and lure guards over, but I can't figure out a way to make them ring on purpose.
- There's never enough objects to interact with and to sneak around in. Let's say they make a long corridor with patroling troops. The sensible way to do it would be to put bushes at regular intervals through the corridor, or shadowy areas or whatever. If they want it to be hard, they'd only put a bush at the beginning and end of the corridor and none inbetween and force you to use the shadows of the pillars to remain undetected. In Monaco, there will be no bushes in any place, no pillars and literally no possible way to sneak through that corridor. All you can do is run in like a dumbass clown, getting seen by like 10 guards and cameras, grab the loot and run away.
- The primary way of handling any situation is to just run into the situation head first, do what you need to do while taking damage, running out, turning a corner and getting into a bush. The guards can't find you if they didn't see you jumping into the bush and like I said, there's way too few objects to hide in or otherwise interact with, so running around a corner and diving into a bush becomes the only way to handle most situations.
So in short, the game's just not much of a stealth game and the levels are not cleverly design with stealth in mind and are instead just decoratively designed with little thought behind it. The perfect example is in a later level, where there's a tall, rectangular room divided into three "lanes" with lasers scanning each one. You must enter from the south and weave through the lasters in the middle "lane" to reach the loot at the top, where two guards are posted and constantly looking in the direction of the lane. This area is impossible to clear with stealth; there's nothing to hide in, a disguise doesn't last long enough to get you past the guards, the charming ability will only work on one of two guards, etc. The only thing you can do in that room is mad dash in like an idiot, grab the trophy and dash to the nearest vent and hope that you can pull all of that off before dying. I still like the game, but it's not very well-designed and I don't understand why it had like 3+ years of hype. A cool visual style really works wonders in this industry...
