Tweet
If Monaco was a movie, then the movie would probably cost a couple of hundred million dollars. Seriously, it's budget busting stuff: massive heists, dozens of casualties, terrifying chases, complex security systems to disarm and plenty of last-minute escapes. Phew.That's if the director took the Ocean's Eleven angle, anyway, but this tale of bank robbers, burglars, and general miscreants shaking up one of the plushest city states in the world could play out very differently. Just listen to the soundtrack with its wonderfully plinky-plonking music hall piano. Maybe Monaco: the movie could be a Keystone Kops offering: bumbling security guards, paper-thin sets and a kind of antic, barely contained energy leading to most of the comedy. High spirits instead of big budgets: that's Monaco thinking.
Even as a game, Monaco should cost a fair bit, really, but the developers have been very canny. Rather than a mega-budget 3D effort, this is a smart, stylish, top-down indie game: all of the excitement at a fraction of the cost, and with a neat look to mark it out from the crowd. It's Hotline Miami for safe-crackers, and the blueprints-styled perspective does a lot more for the adventure than simply negate the need to create expensive geometry for the banks, mansions, and prisons you're busting in and out of. It allows for a widescreen view of proceedings so that you can revel in all of the game's moving parts. It keeps you at arm's length a bit, too, in an entirely thrilling way: you feel ever so slightly removed from the action sometimes, which means when things go wrong, the unfolding chaos has an extra tart little sting to it.
Read more…
More...