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Every good criminal needs an accomplice - someone who'll pull the strings and help drive the long con home. Monaco: What's Yours is Mine's choice of allies is wonderfully risky, though. The undercover operative it's employing is the imagination of its audience. Its inside man is inside the player's head.Your imagination is tasked with translation and embellishment: mapping the game's top-down mazes to the bright arc of the French Riviera and transforming this brisk steal-'em-up's elegant 2D blueprints into lavish museums, hotels and casinos ripe for raiding. That's a neat trick, and it's a testament to the cues that Pocketwatch Games provides that it works as brilliantly as it does. What's even more astonishing, however, is that the developer has the guts to try such a strategy in the first place.
Gambles like this suggest the rakish, confident thinking of a master thief. Monaco is a class act and it knows it. It uses stylishly abstracted visuals and time-worn arcade mechanics to create hilariously unpredictable set-pieces. It's fun for a single player or for four. It uses two interrelated campaigns (an easier one to kick things off and a remixed follow-up that piles on the challenge) to both build and then all but dismantle a breezy crime narrative filled with feints and double-crosses. Finally, it hangs everything on a power fantasy that, for once, almost everyone will be able to endorse. Gather your crew of wayward hardnuts and then spread out across one of the richest city-states in the world, robbing the place blind and avoiding the cops as you finance your escape.
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