Monaco 2 Review (Nicky C)
Loved the first Monaco, basically 100%'ed it, but I really wasn't feeling it at all with this sequel, lots of questionable design decisions.
TL;DR Compared to the first game, navigating is extremely confusing & levels feel too linear at the same time, like the designers are taking all the disadvantages of 3D, and none of the boons. And a bunch of other nitpicks.
First and most notably, reading the screen / map is extremely confusing and hard to read. It is very difficult to tell where the last coins are, objectives, or what the situation is in general. It doesn't help that all the blueprint icons look kinda the same at a glance.
I know people said reading the screen was confusing for the first game was also overwhelming (especially locally), but once you got experienced enough you could parse a lot of important info from the overhead view. I don't really think that's the case with this 3D game, since there's so much obscured and some much noise. In addition, in the first game if you needed to take a second to asses the situation, you could kinda just do that, since the game was naturally having you look at the map. In 2, because of the 3D, you have to press a button to go into map view, and slowly scroll around which makes a big difference.
I think the developers realized that navigation was much more difficult, and added dynamic guiding arrows to point you towards to objective / downed teammates, but that really feels like a patchwork solution.
Another thing is that I didn't feel as if many levels fully take advantage of the new 3D design. Now that multiple floors can be active, you'd imagine there'd be more verticality, or interconnected level design, but it didn't feel like that. Aside from maybe the 3rd level, most of the levels are essentially a linear sequence, despite looking confusing while navigating in real time. You really feel it when you get the objective, then have to run all the way back to the van. The checkpoints really accentuate this design too I feel. Meanwhile the first game, floors were much more wide open, and offered lots of ways to approach and loop back into each other. A common tactic could be to create lots of noise in one area to vacate guards from another, but this sort of play is less usable in the linear levels.
Turret security feels really overpowering compared to other threats. As soon as one is tripped, the turret will be active and auto track ANY players that is in the room and mince through their health, even previously undetected players, or players who enter the room several seconds after the alarm trip. Contrast this to Monaco 1, where a turret would just shoot a burst towards wherever the laser was tripped, and shortly reactivate lasers.
Other nitpicks, movement feels really floaty. I have no idea why, but every level has a defined 4 characters, for no obvious reason? Instead of Monaco 1 where you unlocked characters as the game progressed, you just lose the choice of certain characters on certain levels, seemingly randomly. Sake's dodge roll ability also feels undercooked. Don't feel very good about the new revive system, where you have shared lives, but a 60 second timer to revive, whereas last game had no lives but all the time in the world to revive (and it was mandatory that everyone was alive to transition floors). Getting revived is usually hectic, so the fact that you have a second long vulnerable wakeup doesn't feel great.
Prisoner's being enemies that work in tandem with the prison guards to kill you is just fucking stupid??? Conceptually at least, though from a pure design perspective, their patrols seemed honestly really random, which doesn't feel great in a stealth game.
The prison level really sent me over the edge on these conclusions. It's definitely a difficulty spike, which by itself is not a bad thing, but all these issues I mentioned are especially evident here. Really confusing layout to read, very linear sequence of areas, super powered turret security, and prisoners who will decide to shank you while guards are shooting you.
I could keep at the game to get more experience with this stuff, but I honestly don't want to risk going over the 2 hour refund limit, with what I've seen (and heard from others) so far. I wanna say I hope they fix some of these issues, but a lot of these feel really unfixable.