Monaco

Another day, another Steam game that went on sale recently and has cards. I saw Monaco described as Pac-Man meets Ocean's Eleven and thought that could be pretty interesting. I like Pac-Man, and Ocean's Eleven is one of my favourite movies. What could go wrong?

Well, the first thing that could go wrong is I could fail to connect to a game server. The game can play with up to 4 players in multiplayer and it seems to want to stick you together with random dudes. It tried to do that for me. It failed. But rather than failing gracefully and letting me play single player or something it got the idea stuck in its head that I really had to play with these other people if I was going to play at all despite the fact that I couldn't seem to connect to them. I even tried quitting and starting the program again but it kept hanging. So I had to give up for the day.

I tried again a couple days later and was able to start playing by myself. You play the game as a thief in a 2 dimensional world and need to run around picking up the little piles of money off the ground, just like Pac-Man. There are different weapons you can pick up, and 8 different character classes you could play as, so there's a lot of variety in terms of what you can do. Dig through walls, or charm people, or use your monkey friend to pick people's pockets. I played for about an hour, and it was fun enough, but it didn't really stand out as anything amazing.

The problem was it didn't feel enough like Ocean's Eleven. Probably because I was playing it single player. There was no team of dudes with crazy abilities coming together to do something awesome. Instead it was just me, playing glorified Pac-Man by myself. I can see how it could be pretty cool to build a mission that required 4 people in exactly the right roles to pull it off. I can see how that could feel a lot like raiding did in World of Warcraft. Figure out the problem, make a plan, execute the plan. Die horribly if and when you screw up any of those stages.

I figure I'll end up playing a bit more to at least collect all my Steam cards, and maybe the single player mode will get more interesting as I get further along the mission chain, but I don't have high hopes.