izigame.me

I was planning on waiting until I finished the game to write my review, but I don't think I'm going to finish it. I hate posting this because I'm a die hard fan of the first game, but 8 hours into this game and I'm still not having fun, so I can't imagine that the rest of the game gets any better. I played solo only.
THE MAIN PROBLEMS:
-Difficulty
-Linear maps
-Perspective
-Character selection
-Controls
DIFFICULTY:
The original Monaco had a pretty steep difficulty spike in it at the start of the second act, and that largely came in the form of the maps that you had already heisted from being remixed and upgraded to add more dynamic layouts and challenges. First time going through was hard, but it was a FUN challenge, where even when I failed, I always felt like I could get through it if I just continued, if I tried a different approach, planned carefully, and took my time.
This game the challenge just makes me feel like I'm hopelessly beating my head against a wall, and it's nowhere near giving.
I played through the first three levels, the same levels as the demo, and I enjoyed them. I played through the fourth level, and was a bit surprised at just how MASSIVE the levels were so early. At that point I had been going through and trying to clean out each level, and it was taking me a long time to do that. At the end of the fourth level, there was a cut scene that ran worse than a slide show, with the characters models stuttering and warping, and the only reason I could even understand what was going on is because of the audio.
Then I played the fifth level, The Prison, where every single NPC can and will kill you even though you would think that prisoners would probably not give a shit about you trying to bust out, or at worst act like a normal NPC and try to alert guards. No, they ALL have shanks and the only forgiving thing about the prisoners is that they have a fairly close agro range. It was pretty early on in this level that I realized this game has some serious problems, and worse, I wasn't having any real fun with it.
I pushed on anyway, deciding to forgo cleaning out every level in favor of just getting through the levels to enjoy the story like I did with Monaco 1. I brute forced my way through the next two levels, and then got stuck on the data center for a while because they make the wild choice of introducing the big brutes with shotguns that can kill you in 2 hits. Those bastards weren't introduced in Monaco 1 until the very end of act 1, and even after that were used pretty sparingly.
After bashing my head against that level and eventually scraping by, I made it to the Night Club, and that's where I put it down because that level is just too much for me. I haven't even unlocked every character, but I just don't WANT to play more. It feels difficult to the point of being unfair, and it makes me wonder how much play-testing these levels actually got.

LINEAR MAPS:
I have no idea why, but the maps in this game are extremely linear and it feels so constrictive to how the game is supposed to be played. I first noticed it on the fifth level after hitting a fairly difficult room and realizing that I had no real options on how I wanted to handle the situation. I had to just brute force through an alarm, take the hits, die MULTIPLE times due to random guard pathing and a turret. There are checkpoints that you can respawn at, and you can recollect the life you just lost if you can collect it, but that doesn't make it better. It just means that you can struggle longer and get more frustrated at your lack of options until you either get lucky and brute force your way through, or exit out of the game.
I thought that the maps would open up more a bit further in, because the early maps in Monaco 1 were also fairly linear as they were tutorial levels. 9 levels in and it STILL feels like you're just going through a fairly locked in path with very few real directions to go, collecting keys and then following a literal arrow path to the next stop. With how HUGE these levels are, there should be even more freedom on how you want to approach a heist, not less, but the only time I look at the map is to see where I HAVE to go next, and where I missed a damn coin.
All of that mixed with the difficulty makes each level an absolute SLOG FEST to get through.

PERSPECTIVE:
The perspective in this isn't the worst thing ever, but it certainly makes things feel a lot more claustrophobic and confusing, and I think the choice to take the game from a top-down to where it is now was a mistake. With how busy the maps are, being able to take things in from a top-down perspective would have been very welcome, even if it was a toggleable mode or something. I suspect that the perspective has something to do with the verticality angle they went with for this one, but honestly I would have preferred just not having that verticallity (especially since it didn't end up adding much to the game anyway) if I could just have a more cohesive look at what was going on around me at any given time, even with FOV limitations.
Monaco 1 was a very beautiful game, even without 3d graphics. The style, usage of colors, and details put into every map made it feel alive and full without being cluttered (once you got used to it anyway). Monaco 2 feels cluttered.

CHARACTER SELECTION:
Why can I not play as Cosmo every level? Where is Gimlet? I want my dog. The only real reason I can imagine that there would be a limit on who can be played on what levels is for balancing purposes, to keep characters who might be too powerful in a level from breaking it? Or maybe to force players to try different characters instead of finding one they like and then just running that character the entire game. If it's a balancing choice then they did a bad job balancing overall because the game is way too hard as is. If it was to force players to try different characters then that's stupid give me my dog and let me be happy.

CONTROLS:
Controls have been complained about since the demo came out. The characters move in a very floaty way that almost makes them feel disconnected from the world. And the fact that you can't cancel out of interacting with objects (lock-picking, hacking, etc.) is WILD to me considering how often you end up needing to bail out when you get caught or lasers turn back on. I shouldn't have to just sit there while a guard shoots me with a shotgun because I haven't finished lock-picking a safe.

FINAL THOUGHTS:
I really wish I didn't have to give this game a negative review, because I was such a huge fan of the first one, but this sequel just didn't do it any justice. I can't even praise the story because what bit I experienced didn't capture me the same way that Monaco 1's story did, and even if it had the game is just to difficult for me to get through to experience the rest of it.
Some of the problems are obviously baked into the game's core, but I do think that the worst of the problems (difficulty & linear maps, maybe even a perspective choice) COULD eventually be patched with a lot more play-testing to make this a much better game. Problem is that it feels like we're doing the play-testing.