The Swindle caught my attention when I was looking for something to scratch my itch for a good stealth game. The base premise is simple; break into a randomly generated level and steal as much cash as you can. The gameplay reminds me of Stealth Inc, but the platforming does feel a bit stiffer and it includes a few roguelike mechanics. The story is that you have 100 days to break into Scotland Yard and steal an AI. A rather important task as the AI will make crime impossible, which is obviously bad for the thieving business.
All heists you undertake cost one day, no matter how they play out. There are three states for the end of a heist. If you get over 80% of the loot in a level, you are successful and get a bonus to go with your loot. The more successes you have with one thief, the bigger the bonus gets. If you get under 80% of the loot you have only completed the heist. This will not increase your bonus, but it also will not reset the chain of the current thief.
Worst case scenario, your thief has died. You spent a day, got 0% of the loot and lost any bonus chain you might have had. Obviously not good, but the silver lining of it is any abilities and equipment you have bought stay with you. So while you lose a lot when a good thief is gone, you aren’t starting from scratch.
Speaking of buying things, money is not only used to upgrade your thief. There are six areas in the game, each giving you substantially more money than the last. Gaining access to the next area above you will cost a lot of money, but is usually worth it. Balance is important, however, as getting to an area filled with riches is pointless if you don’t have the abilities to get them.
To achieve the end goal of the game you must get to area five and perform ‘The Swindle’; the final heist to steal the police AI and protect your lively hood. Getting to area five will not be easy as you’ll have to collect money and sneak past all sorts of remarkably over the top defenses. The game does a good job at ensuring a short streak of well-paying days will give you enough money for the upgrades you might need.
The game has quite simple controls. The only thing that trips me up is my instinct of pushing down to slide down a wall, and releasing the stick to stop. This got me killed a few times in a row as the game wants you to push away from the way to stop sliding. This version is also simple, I admit, but it took me a while to override my instinct.
Graphically the game looks great, the art style is fantastic and there are some effects that I just love, the double jump being a little pack that shoots steam out behind you, for example. The game also lets you see fields of vision for all the guards, allowing you to plan out your next
move accurately. The soundtrack is also well crafted. It keeps you on your toes the whole time and, if you’re detected, kicks off into some wonderfully tense escape music.
There are some problems with the game, however. I do hope these will be fixed in a patch but for now they exist. Some of them aren’t too bad, like having enemies get stuck in windows, which is quite annoying as it makes it nearly impossible to kill them without being seen, but they can usually be avoided. The biggest problem, though, is when the game crashes. I’m playing the game on PlayStation 4 and it crashes maybe once or twice an hour. While this isn’t that terrible as the game saves very frequently it is still annoying to open the game over and over. I got questioned by a PSN friend as he saw I had played the game 22 times in one day. In fact in all of the crashes I’ve had, I’ve been able to continue from where it crashed without losing anything. All but one of the crashes, that is.
I once got enough money together to unlock the final heist of the game. Before I could play it, however, the game crashed and corrupted my save file, forcing me to abandon that run. While I admit that experience was disheartening, I can’t say it put me off the game for long as I was playing again a few hours later.
Overall, I’d maybe wait on this game until some of the issues are patched out or I’d suggest you pick the game up on a different platform. However, setting its issues aside, The Swindle is a fantastic game. It’s a tense stealth game with a lot of emphasis on playing it safe, but also encourages ambition in the levels. A tough balance to get right, but when you have a heist that goes perfectly, the feeling of success is very rewarding.
Very rewarding stealth platformer heavily marred with performance issues.
