1196: What’s Yours is Mine

My good friend Mark and I played a bunch of Monaco: What’s Mine is Yours What’s Yours is Mine (damn it all to hell, I KEEP getting that the wrong way round) via the wonder that is the Internet this evening. It’s rather fun.

If you haven’t come across this peculiar little game before, it’s essentially a multiplayer stealth game in which you cooperate to complete various heists as efficiently as possible. This isn’t a ludicrously violent first-person shooter-style heist as in Payday: The Heist, however; no, these are missions where you have to sneak, think carefully about what you’re doing and occasionally frantically improvise while being chased by a pack of slathering dogs.

Monaco’s main distinguishing feature over many of its peers is its heavy sense of style. Levels are depicted from a top-down perspective as a black-and-white “blueprint” of the building the team are currently plundering, with only the regions visible to the player’s current position “lit up” and showing their full detail. The rest of the blueprint is marked with various icons showing objects that can be interacted with, treasures to find and the eventual mission goal.

Controlling Monaco is extremely simple. Most actions are performed simply by walking into the object you would like to interact with — walk into a locked door to pick its lock, walk into a computer to hack it, walk into a safe to crack it. Each of the game’s character classes, each of whom are unlocked over the course of the complete campaign, have their own special abilities that can help the team as a whole. The Lookout, for example, displays the locations of all guards and civilians (who alert guards) on the map when she is either standing still or sneaking. The Locksmith, meanwhile, can pick locks and crack safes more quickly, while The Cleaner can knock out guards or civilians that are unaware of his presence. Each level also has certain items that can help out — sometimes there are guns which can be used to kill guards, sometimes smoke bombs to sneak past, sometimes EMP grenades to disrupt electrical systems.

The interesting thing about Monaco is that it doesn’t spoon-feed the player everything. You’re given basic tutorial text through prompts on the floor as information becomes relevant, but the specifics are up to you to determine through experimentation. For example, on the last level Mark and I played this evening, we came across doors marked with a “hand” symbol that appeared to set off alarms if we successfully opened them. We subsequently discovered that these doors and the alarms could be bypassed by either hacking a nearby computer or cutting the power to the area they were in. The game didn’t tell us this — we had to find it out for ourselves. I’m all for this.

This lack of spoon-feeding extends to the visual information provided to the player, too. The top-down display of what’s going on is presented in a rather abstract manner, so you have to use your imagination to picture what’s actually going on. In many ways, it’s quite like a board game — albeit one you play in real-time — as you spend a lot of time looking at abstract representations of things rather than what they actually are. Nice little touches are there to stoke the fires of the imagination, however — the “blueprints” for the buildings are all marked with the names of each room, for example, so you can picture the purpose of each place you visit and why you’re there. Some truly excellent (and easy-to-miss) ambient sound gives a wonderful sense of atmosphere to the whole experience, too. This is a game worth wearing headphones for, as just by using speakers you’ll miss out on a lot of interesting audio cues.

Perhaps most pleasing is the fact that it’s a cooperative game that can be played either online or off. Up to four players can cooperate with one another either all on the same computer, over a LAN or via the Internet. The game can also be played solo — and is a completely different experience when doing so, as you can’t rely on the other players and their characters’ abilities to back you up.

On the whole, it seems to be a really interesting game that I’m looking forward to trying again with friends. It’s noticeably different from the “norm” and a lot of fun to play. It’s also just twelve quid, so grab a copy today.