izigame.me

HeistGeist is a good game. It still feels like it lacks in certain aspects, but overall it's an enjoyable experience, and it definitely feels like a passion project. I'm actually sad that it's mostly unnoticed.
If you want a quick comparison - it's like Slay the Spire, but if every run were a prewritten linear heist instead of being a randomly generated run.
Pros/Cons/Other:
- The deckbuilder is clunky to use. The main protagonist of the story (the one you'll fight the most with) has a combo system based on tags. Naturally, you want a somewhat even distribution of tags in your deck, but the deckbuilder doesn't clearly display the number of tags, you need to manually count them. Also, removing cards from the deck requires searching on the right-side panel, while adding cards requires searching in the center panel.
- The mentioned combo system is very good. It's easy to learn and requires deck balancing to master. To get the most out of your cards, you need to play them in a red-blue pattern, with yellow usually being a finisher.
- Balance is a bit off. For example, there are cards that ignore shields, but they have some kind of tradeoff to make up for it, like lower damage or higher cost. The problem is that ignoring shields is ultimately worthless unless the majority of your deck consists of shield-ignoring cards. The shield still protects enemies' HP as intended. Shield ignoring is only useful when the enemy has low HP but still has a shield. There are also overpowered cards like "Risky Gamble" which, when upgraded, allows you to draw your entire deck. This led me to create an infinite damage build and one-shot every combat encounter. Self-healing cards (mainly Toxic Healing and its upgraded variants) are overpowered since you can play them multiple times - it's just a matter of drawing them again. And with an enemies usually balancing between offense and utility - you have time to heal up.
- There's a way to upgrade cards, and it's very good. Ultimately, each card has three versions. However, the condition to upgrade a card is to play it 20 times. The problem is that cards received late in the game also have this condition, and you often don't have enough time to upgrade them, especially if the card has the "remove" keyword, requiring 20 combat encounters to upgrade. A way to upgrade cards using money would be very nice.
- The story is linear, which personally, I don't see as a bad thing. The heists themselves are linear too, though I would have loved some optional objectives.
- There's no way to speed up the animations. Once you get into elaborate combos, a significant amount of time is spent on animations.
- The characters are very cool and narrated beautifully, each with distinct flair. However, I can't say the same about the main character, Alex. Truth be told, I initially thought she was voiced via text-to-speech.
- There's also a different hacker game executed quite well.
- The story is good but requires some handwaving to work.
- Last point, I'm not sure there's NG+ or that you can play the game after it's completion. Thus making you play through the game again if you want to get any remaining achievements.
Overall, it's an enjoyable experience that will take you around 15-17 hours if you decide to talk to everybody.