Feeling rebellious? Want to make some quick virtual fake money? Well, I might just have a game for you. Let's see how masterful our heists are going to be in The Masterplan.
The Masterplan from Shark Punch is a top-down tactical heist game in which you will attempt to gain money by robbing emptying art galleries, minimarts and jewellery stores from all valuables and trying to get away without the police catching you. You must carefully plan how to get through the numerous security cameras, guards and locked doors without alerting too many people of your presence. And when all else fails you can take the innocent bystanders as hostage or kill them to prevent them from killing/capturing your crew or calling the cops.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsBHZUYBNhQ
The Masterplan is certainly interesting. It requires you to be very careful about your actions because things can go very wrong very fast. Leave one guy standing in the line of sight by a camera – cops arrive in 30 seconds. Try to knock down a guard without someone pointing a gun at him – your guy gets owned. The game also penalizes use of lethal force very heavily, making your heists nearly worthless if you get into a real firefight with the guards. Thus it's more efficient to knock down guards and bystanders or avoid them entirely instead of killing them on the spot.
One thing I really like about the game is the way you handle the hostages. If you need someone to stand in another place or just stay put all you need to do is point one of your guys' gun at the bystanders and you can move them like you move your own crew. But you need to be very careful with the hostages as they will try to run and alert cops if you let your guard down. The NPCs have a circle above them that indicates how threatened they feel they are. If that drops down to zero they will try to run or in the case of the guards pull out their weapons and start blasting away at your guys. Guards are also a lot harder to keep under control and based on my experiences the best way to handle them is to just point a gun at them and let someone knock them down while they are being held hostage.
I feel the mechanics of this game can make it go far. There is one thing that I don't like at the moment though. There isn't that much to do right now in the game. Your only objective in the early access build is to complete the heists to unlock more heists. You can very quickly unlock some of the more difficult and more rewarding heists which means that money is not really an issue and you can unlock rest of the heists in no time. It's good that you don't need to grind the same old heist over and over but on the other hand it also means that you can play through the game very quickly. And once you know how a certain heist should be pulled of you lose a lot of the replay value. Naturally there are multiple ways of doing the heists but usually just one or two of them will have the optimal risk-reward ratio. Naturally we can just say that the game is in Early Access and can't be expected to be fully complete yet but I believe this should be mentioned regardless. Hopefully future updates will bring in more maps, equipment and maybe a full campaign system of some sort.
So, overall the game is good. The mechanics work and I haven't encountered any bugs or crashes. It's a solid experience but with the limited number of maps currently available it might be a short one.
You can buy the game DRM-free using the Humble Widget on their website: http://sharkpunch.com/
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
The Masterplan from Shark Punch is a top-down tactical heist game in which you will attempt to gain money by robbing emptying art galleries, minimarts and jewellery stores from all valuables and trying to get away without the police catching you. You must carefully plan how to get through the numerous security cameras, guards and locked doors without alerting too many people of your presence. And when all else fails you can take the innocent bystanders as hostage or kill them to prevent them from killing/capturing your crew or calling the cops.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsBHZUYBNhQ
The Masterplan is certainly interesting. It requires you to be very careful about your actions because things can go very wrong very fast. Leave one guy standing in the line of sight by a camera – cops arrive in 30 seconds. Try to knock down a guard without someone pointing a gun at him – your guy gets owned. The game also penalizes use of lethal force very heavily, making your heists nearly worthless if you get into a real firefight with the guards. Thus it's more efficient to knock down guards and bystanders or avoid them entirely instead of killing them on the spot.
One thing I really like about the game is the way you handle the hostages. If you need someone to stand in another place or just stay put all you need to do is point one of your guys' gun at the bystanders and you can move them like you move your own crew. But you need to be very careful with the hostages as they will try to run and alert cops if you let your guard down. The NPCs have a circle above them that indicates how threatened they feel they are. If that drops down to zero they will try to run or in the case of the guards pull out their weapons and start blasting away at your guys. Guards are also a lot harder to keep under control and based on my experiences the best way to handle them is to just point a gun at them and let someone knock them down while they are being held hostage.
I feel the mechanics of this game can make it go far. There is one thing that I don't like at the moment though. There isn't that much to do right now in the game. Your only objective in the early access build is to complete the heists to unlock more heists. You can very quickly unlock some of the more difficult and more rewarding heists which means that money is not really an issue and you can unlock rest of the heists in no time. It's good that you don't need to grind the same old heist over and over but on the other hand it also means that you can play through the game very quickly. And once you know how a certain heist should be pulled of you lose a lot of the replay value. Naturally there are multiple ways of doing the heists but usually just one or two of them will have the optimal risk-reward ratio. Naturally we can just say that the game is in Early Access and can't be expected to be fully complete yet but I believe this should be mentioned regardless. Hopefully future updates will bring in more maps, equipment and maybe a full campaign system of some sort.
So, overall the game is good. The mechanics work and I haven't encountered any bugs or crashes. It's a solid experience but with the limited number of maps currently available it might be a short one.
You can buy the game DRM-free using the Humble Widget on their website: http://sharkpunch.com/
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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