The Swindle

[SomTervo]

This game is brilliant. Trailer:

 

 

Total sleeper hit for me. I really liked Mark of the Ninja and I love Spelunky, and I adore the stealth genre in general. This game is literally what you get if you put a point between Thief, Spelunky and MotN.

 

The concept:

 

You are a poor band of thieves operating in steampunk London. In 100 days, the City of London police are going to make the greatest security system ever conceived, and you'll be shit out of any thieving opportunities... forever.

 

In 100 days you have to start from £0 in the slums of London and work your way up to the tightest security joint in London, coming at it with the best gear possible to hack, break, and sneak your way into it to steal the police's oober-security device.

 

The gameplay:

 

Mark of the Ninja style stealth, but with a robust RPG system underneath, and Spelunky's perma-deaths. At the start you can do very little - whack, climb, hack computers for money. It costs a lot to upgrade your abilities, but you get double jumps, wall-sticks, gadgets like bombs, better computer skills, the ability to put off guards, more vision abilities, etc, etc. The list goes on quite far. (Death doesn't affect your thief's training, so you lose a good XP bonus for dying and you get a new model/name, but you keep all your gadgets/abilities.)

 

Every level is randomly generated. There are five 'tiers' of levels, which, unlike in Spelunky, you unlock permanently (for your 100-go duration), and the last one is 'The Swindle', the last level).

 

You get pocket change lying around levels in abundance (at first like £8 a pop) but if you hack computer systems (with an intense little QTE sequence to nail it) you get lots (at first like £800). As you unlock new stages, the amount of money you earn goes up exponentially. 

 

The first time you case a joint with nobody seeing you, hack all their machines and blackjack all your drones, and fly off in your escape pod... My god the rush.

 

Problems:

 

It's slightly janky and has some control input issues on PS4. Plus it's randomly generated so sometimes there are stratospheric difficulty spikes. On the whole though, it's fucking great. I played for 3.5 hours today and only got frustrated a couple of times.

 

I played all the way to only having 16 days left out of 100, and only on the third world of 5 (6 including last level) but I do not mind that I'm about to perma-lose. The thought of starting again from scratch with all my knowledge and understanding is thrilling. I now know how to case joints up to 'level 3' - mansions. The city won't know what hit it.