Monaco: What's Yours Is Mine Review
Game Emblems
The Good
The uneven Monaco: What Yours Is Mine showcases the highs and lows of being a professional thief.
The Good
- Strong diversity of gadgets and character abilities
- Dynamic cooperative heists
- Amazing musical score
- Novel artistic design.
The Bad
- Too easy to evade guards
- Unlocking later levels is a grind.
Thieves are an indefatigable lot. Even the best surveillance equipment can only temporarily slow down a resourceful robber, and protecting treasure only gets harder as its value rises. So when a talented burglar lives in the affluent city-state of Monaco, the lure of priceless goods is impossible to resist. After all, just one late-night outing to an inviting bank could yield enough fortune to retire to an even more beautiful place than this quiet French Riviera locale. In Monaco: What's Yours is Mine, you fill your bulging pockets with every coin and gold nugget you can get your hands on, and though the bumbling guards have little chance of thwarting your hijinks, the rush of a successful heist makes you eager to dig deeper into the world of villainy.
Navigating the decadent buildings that populate Monaco is akin to reading a blueprint. Viewed from a top-down perspective, the floor plan is not immediately discernible. Room names are etched in bold font, clearly labeling where the vault or dressing room is located, but the details aren't apparent until your sight lines give substance to the rough sketch. There's a disorienting transition at first as a basic outline becomes a fully realized room when you enter it, and then transforms back to a lifeless map when you leave. Lights and colors seemingly flash at random, so getting your bearings can be troublesome because of the unique way things are communicated. But once you understand how to read the blocky shapes, there's a beautiful elegance to the abstract visual design.
You start by selecting one specialist from a group of skilled thieves and try to ransack Monaco, either by your lonesome or with up to three friends. Each character is well schooled in the art of stealing, which makes it possible to slink through darkened halls no matter whom you select or how many people are in your party. Everyone can pick locks, hack computers, open safes, and bamboozle guards, but each character has his or her own expertise as well. The lookout, for instance, identifies obstacles and valuables outside of your normal field of view, while the cleaner can knock guards unconscious with a whack to the back of the head. All of the characters have a role that makes completing levels easier, except for the pickpocket. Although his monkey pal can collect stray gold coins, he's not thorough enough to make him a worthwhile choice.
Objectives remain the same regardless of which character you choose. Infiltrate a building, steal a specific treasure, and then flee faster than you've ever fled before. Guards shine their flashlights down blackened hallways, marching in unpredictable patterns that keep you guessing which path you should take to avoid them. Locked doors and security lasers abound, and though it takes no more than a few seconds to disable most obstacles, there's an undeniable feeling of dread as you frantically try to pick a lock while a guard hovers dangerously nearby. When your trackers sense that something is amiss, they mutter French phrases that make you hold your breath. Quoi? Qui va la?? It's a tense ordeal, and your heart flutters all the more thanks to the excellent musical score. A simple piano melody accompanies your voyage through the shadows, but once you're spotted, the tempo quickens, making you feel the stress of imminent capture.
Trying to glide unseen through formidable compounds is nerve-racking, but Monaco stumbles when you're sighted. Guards yell frantically to their colleagues, and sirens issue a piercing blare, but you can escape from the chaos in a pinch. Memory issues plague every guard, so even if they watch you crawl into an air duct, they soon forget about your existence. Air ducts are not present in every level, but staircases are. When you move to a new landing, the guards have no idea there was a disturbance down below, and if you want to go back to where you started the ruckus, it takes only a few seconds for everything to go back to normal.
By
Tom Mc Shea, Editor
Tom Mc Shea loves platformers and weighty moral decisions. Some call him a T-Rex with bigger arms, some call him a gorilla with smaller arms -- you can just call him the jerk who hates all the things you love and loves all the things you hate.
71 comments
I really like to give this game a try but I have no friends to play it online with, is it easy to find others who are willing to play co-op?
I guess it doesn't matter anyway. This isn't a commercial game. And it only costs $15. Chances are, if you know about this game, you already got it. And if you don't, your friend will talk you into it anyway because it's only $15. The score doesn't matter...people will still buy it. And according to Andy on his livestream earlier...he's doing very well sales wise!
It sparks little interest being a "professional thief" for me. I prefer being a thief in FF!
1 Like I've never really understood people's problem with short term memory guards. Would you rather be chased everywhere relentlessly the moment you're spotted, forcing you to NEVER be seen if you want to ever beat a level?
@MooncalfReviews @brok but this game doesn't strive for realism. It's meant to be light hearted and fun.
@LpcWarrior @MooncalfReviews plus, as we all know- realism is quite often the polar opposite of fun.
@brok No. But there needs to be a middle ground so that they actually present a challenge.
@peanut-butter Oh absolutely- there has to be a reason to strive not to be seen in the first place, definitely.
@brok @peanut-butter @brok @peanut-butter The guards get way more dangerous later on in the game, when they start to use machine guns and shotguns that can kill you very quickly. But you can breeze through much of the first half of the game by just ignoring the slow-moving, unarmed guards. Run past the guards, grab the loot, and make a bee-line to the nearest airduct is a good strategy for the first part of the game. But trying to beat the later missions that way will get you destroyed.
Personally thinks that it's absolutely right that game scores should be re-normalised, it seems that the word "good" simply doesn't mean good any more and actually means "bad" or "unplayable" to many people. It seems that during the last few years scores were constantly inflated by good console exclusives trying to outscore each other and games that were innovative but actually weren't well refined (I'm looking at you Assassin's Creed 1)
awesome game, awesome review. Could have gotten a bit better score but i can see some people hating a game like this.
4 Like Your score contradicts your review. This seems to be a common trend at GameSpot. It would help if you could break down how you distribute each point in your score. At the moment I'm left with all the questions. Does an average AI really deserve a 2 point loss? You didn't really mention anything that couldn't be improved with a bit of tweaks, but to give the game a permanent scar on their scorecard for these trivial quirks is not extremely well thought out.
3 Like @SKaREO 7/10 is way above average. Even bordering on very good. I don't get what so hard to understand about this.
@misterBullseye People keep saying that. And it's probably true for people like us. But for the average consumer, a 7/10 is a C grade game. And I don't know about you, but when I grew up a "C" meant "you better try harder". This game deserves more than a "C" in my opinion. And I feel indie games shouldn't be judged as harshly in the first place. They are the ones that push the artistic and design boundaries. They aren't hashed out every year or expect a high revenue..they are designed purely with love and absolute devotion to the media. That alone should warrant at least another point.
@Stillwind04 Well they gave Surgeon Simulator 2013 an 8, and I don't think they aren't being judged harshly if anything some reviewers here like to hype them up and give them more praise than they deserve.
Ugh.. I hate it when games require a certain number of stars, medals, coins, etc., to unlock. And, haha! "I'm getting McShea'd!"
2 Like Love the artistic style of this game, definitely going to check it out. Though I wish more friends had PC's :(
Can we add like a "I agree that numbers do not really matter and the actual body of the review does" clause to the GameSpot terms and agreements?
11 Like GameSpot readers are the stupidest people in the galaxy. Every review's comments section is chock full of mouthbreathing goofs freaking out over a number that would mean so much less if they weren't too lazy to read the words above. Bravo, everybody.
5 Like Tommy boy, i don't think people are pissed on the low score as much as they are pissed at the fact that this very website accorded games like cod over 8.5 for being the same recycled game every year, while you rate an indie game which won the 2010 IGF award with 7.0 for not being sufficiently challenging as in guards AI while, in the same review you say the game is rewarding, unique and sneaking past guards is exhilarating and fun. I won't even touch the "you must grind in order to progress to later levels" which is not true. Do you even know the meaning of the word "grind". Collecting every piece of gold coin isn't grinding, collecting the same gold coins repeatedly is grinding. I get the fact that you came here and explained to people that "7 isn't a low score" and such but i doubt how many people will get that, nor how many people will understand the game is definitely worth getting judging by the fact that mediocre games got bigger scores than this. The thing i'm most sorry about is that a truly great developer might "lose" money he would otherwise earn for his hard and brilliant work due to the fact that people will interpret that 7 as a not so great game.
@k9bdog I'll just say that people who judge a 7 to be a low score would probably never have been interested in the game to begin with...
5 Like @k9bdog Why do people continually bring up Call of Duty in the comments of my reviews and editorials? I have nothing but bad things to say about that franchise.
Also, unlocking later levels is a grind. In other words, tedious or boring.
6 Like @TomMcShea i feel like you completely missed my point. It doesn't matter what YOU have to say about the cod franchise, it's about what the common folk would expect from this website, which is some sort of consistency. I find it odd that the games in that franchise get such high scores while this one, doesn't, and i repeat, for incoherent reasons. If the AI is bad, as in the lack of challenge in getting passed them i don't think the game would be"rewarding, unique" and "sneaking past guards - would be - exhilarating and fun". This website is lacking consistency. One more example would be the case of Dark Souls' PC Review which was completely identical to the console one and completely oblivious of the port issues it had and in a later response Caroline said that those issues weren't a problem for her while dozens of people were complaining exactly about that. As for your response related to grinding i have this to say, grinding is a term which is used usually in mmo games to point at the tedious act of doing the exact same thing over and over again, and in my humble opinion this is not the case. Collecting all gold coins isn't "grinding".
1 Like @k9bdog @TomMcShea I guess we disagree. I was regularly able to exploit the AI yet still found it fun to sneak around. I'm not sure how that isn't consistent. Games with problems can still be fun. Also, Caro (and all of us) only write about our experiences with a game. If Caro didn't have problems in Dark Souls, what do you want her to do?
Finally, saying something is a grind is different than saying it's grinding. Different meanings.
@k9bdog Oh, sorry, I didn't realize your comments were absolutely constructive. It wasn't a rant at all...
2 Like @pal_080 not once have i said that "i hate this site so much". I am engaged in what i'm hoping to be a constructive argument that would benefit Gamespot's readers, myself included. I do not know why you bother to reply in such a useless manner.
1 Like @k9bdog uhhh... grow up and do your own writing? For crying out loud, if you hate this site so much then don't bother visiting and commenting. Of course there will be some "inconsistency" as you put it, when reviews are carried out by multiple staff members with differing tastes and values. The body of the review usually explains things well enough for someone to get an idea of the game... that's all that needs to be done.
ps, i'm not concerned about the money that the developer is making as i would have any personal gain, but because good money would translate in his confidence as a developer and in future great releases signed by this guy.
Not to mention that you didn't even touch the modding tools, which i am not sure now that they did or did not come with the game.
1 Like Ooooh... cant wait to play this with a group of friends. Now to go and make some.
2 Like Don't really care what score Tom gave this game. I heard it was worth a play, so I'll definitely check it out for myself.
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Monaco: What's Yours Is Mine
Not Following
- Publisher(s): Majesco Games
- Developer(s): Pocketwatch Games
- Genre: Adventure
- Release:
- ESRB: T
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