Rating of
4/5
Yours, Mine, and Ours
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 03/26/16
“Monaco: What’s Yours Is Mine” (“Monaco”) is the one and only independently developed title from Pocketwatch games, whose only other extant release is “Wildlife Tycoon: Venture Africa,” which they developed for publisher MumboJumbo way back in 2006 – 7 years before “Monaco’s” release in 2013. I initially had no interest in “Monaco,” and have generally found accurate information about the game to be rather sparse online. Nick, however, ended up with a free copy when his brother bought a 4-pack on sale and only had two other friends to play it with, thus the MJ Crew got to experience some good old fashioned local co-op on the PC, of all platforms.
Presentation
“Monaco” is a very weird and stylized game that employs two distinct visual styles. The first style is used during pre-stage cutscenes, and uses incredibly crude Atari 2600-caliber pixel art to represent the characters. I love pixel art, but I draw the line of acceptability at 8-bit styling, with prejudice against anything lower than 16-bit styling. “Monaco’s” cutscenes are so blobby and indistinct that it makes it difficult to even identify which blobs are supposed to be characters.
The other art style employed by the game is used during all of the actual gameplay stages. This art style employs a rather unique form of sprite layering to create dimensional characters from a straight top-down view. Unfortunately, these sprites are also rather crude and vague, giving people odd LEGO-man-like arms and snowman-like bodies make of three stacked squares. It’s difficult to tell what a lot of the things on-screen are supposed to be at first glance. After a while, though, interpreting the game’s visuals becomes a bit like interpreting any other form of crude folk art – it’s serviceable but never attractive. The best part of the in-game visuals is the fact that the stage layout is completely visible from the outset, but only as a blueprint-styled floorplan. This blueprint gives way to the actual stage graphics only when a character has direct line-of-sight to it.
The audio, on the other hand, is fantastic. The soundtrack is a vaguely vaudevillian piano score that rises and falls dynamically in accordance with the players’ activities. The game is not fully voiced (during cutscenes, for instance), but does feature a number of vocal sound effects for enemies consisting of a gibberish language that is as close to French as the language in “Magicka” is to Swedish. Both aspects of the game’s audio combine perfectly to enhance its atmosphere.
Story
“Monaco” tells the tale of several big time crooks who escape from prison in the French-speaking republic of Monaco, with the intention of fleeing the country. As they try to wipe away evidence that could be used to track them down, they end up calling in a few favors from an increasingly devious range of other criminals, pushing their simple goal further and further from reach with each successive hitch in the plan.
The cast of characters, which starts with 4 but ends up double that at 8, is a fairly stereotypic crew of villains, seemingly modeled after other famous crime groups like the Oceans 11, but each has their own distinct personality that comes across in the overly-blobby cutscenes. The game’s narrative is also fairly unique in that each stage can be played from the perspective of multiple characters, with different viewpoints on how the whole thing actually happened. I normally hate crime stories, but “Monaco’s” slightly-weird, slightly “Mission Impossible” take on the concept made it reasonably endearing.
Gameplay
Nobody online seems to know what genre “Monaco” belongs to. I have frequently seen it listed as an Adventure game, when that actually couldn’t be further from the truth. “Monaco” is very much part of the relatively new Action/Stealth genre. Each stage begins with a goal – typically collecting some key object(s) represented by trophies in-game – and the player(s) must infiltrate and sneak through multiple floors of a building in order to acquire said goal, then return to the ground-level floor and escape via a stolen vehicle. While pursuing the goal, players can also attempt to ‘Clean Out’ the stage by collecting all of the optional coins scattered around.
Each stage is presented from a top-down bird’s-eye view, and players can only see what’s happening within their line of sight. It’s possible to ‘listen’ for enemy guards that are just out of line-of-sight by watching their footprints appear on the map. Players in “Monaco” start with no offensive capabilities, thus sneaking (with the designated Sneak Button) is the order of the day. Creeping past guards, disabling security systems, picking locks, hacking, tunneling: All are viable thieving techniques depending on the character(s) brought into the stage.
When playing single-player, “Monaco’s” cast of characters acts like a set of 1-ups, similarly to the old ‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’ games, where each character represented a life and getting all characters killed resulted in Game Over. In multi-player co-op, however, only the characters chosen by the 2-4 players are available, but they can revive each other (with amazingly grotesque blowjob sound effects!) should any of them go down.
It is possible for players to fight back, provided they pick up a weapon power-up in a stage. Unfortunately, all power-ups picked up by a given character share that character’s usage pool. By default, a character gets two item uses per stage, but can gain more uses by picking up the optional coins in the stage.
The cast of 8 characters each has a very diverse skillset: The Locksmith can pick locks and open safes extra quickly, the Pickpocket has a pet monkey that vacuums up coins at range (ensuring that the Pickpocket is the only character with more than two item uses per stage!), the Lookout moves quickly and serves primarily as a spotter, the Cleaner can temporarily knock-out unaware enemies with chloroform, the Mole can tunnel through most walls and obstacles, the Hacker can disable electronic locks and security systems more quickly, the Gentleman can innately use the disguise item, and the Redhead can charm one enemy at a time. Setting up a good team for each stage is essential and requires good tactical thinking. Once in a stage, the characters do need to coordinate movements and activities in order to both move quickly and avoid detection. Unfortunately, most of the MJ Crew doesn’t know what letters are in the word ‘team.’
Overall
“Monaco: What’s Yours Is Mine” is a cute (like an ugly baby) little Action/Stealth experience with amusing writing, great audio work, and gameplay that is both fun and engaging. Whether solo or co-op, “Monaco” is a good time, and proves without a shadow of a doubt that PC gaming is just as capable of local co-op as console gaming, provided developers open their eyes to the demand for more local experiences on the platform.
Presentation: 3/5
Story: 4/5
Gameplay: 4/5
Overall (not an average): 4/5
