Cash_Out is a randomly generated, top-down shooter where you must make your way through buildings loaded with guards, security traps and loot. You must make your heist as profitable as possible by grabbing money, valuables, and the big score you came for - a huge pile of cash.
For an early access game, I'm really quite impressed. The game has quite a lot of different mechanics, and the randomly generated heists make each one rather unpredictable. Some rooms are utterly filled with tripwires, cameras and motion sensors, and guards armed to the teeth, others are lightly patrolled. If you've played Borderlands, you'll come to find a similarity in the weapons system, in that almost no two weapons are alike, and all have different stats and attachments which will help you eliminate the guards in your way. You can have things like a Quick Accurate Revolver (with a laser sight on it), to a Cheap Powerful Rifle (with incendiary rounds), or an Adequate Kunai of Flight (electrified for more fun) with each weapon having unique stats such as accuracy, throwing speed, damage, and more.
Of course, you don't necessarily need to go in guns blazing - You have stealth and the ability to hack, so you can sneak around and backstab the guards in your way, and hack the doors to the next room open, so that you can sneak past the others, or hack a camera to slip past unnoticed. You can use the shadows to get past guards without them seeing you, or even pick up objects such as glass bottles and throw them to create a distraction. It's all down to your own personal playstyle, as stealth might not work as well for you as using the guards as human shields and gunning down all opposition.
Each heist allows you to find clothing, each which have their own different stat buffs, which can completely change the way you play the game. For example, the Leather Jacket will decrease the melee damage you take, Overalls will increase your damage with guns, Hacker Pants will heal you a little for each device you hack, etc. It's worth finding as many of these as you can and mixing them up to your own taste.
You can also find consumables, which include, but aren't limited to - Flashbangs, Gas Grenades, Ammo Packs, Bandages, Blueprints, and more. Each of these can be used in your heists to good effect, allowing you to gain an advantage on the enemy and make your heist a success.
Throughout the heists you can find lockboxes, which contain random equipment and cash, which you can open with cash. (ingame cash, no microtransactions here!) Some lockboxes may require a key instead, or my favourite lockboxes, the Puzzle Lockboxes, which as the name suggests, has you solving a puzzle in a time limit to gain access to the contents. Should you not need a specific weapon, consumable, or piece of clothing anymore, you can always sell it in the shop in between heists where you can then use your cash to purchase upgrades for the stuff you do use, as well as new equipment. You also have the bank which allows you to deposit gear you want to keep.
The game has difficulty modes, with Easy being, easy, and on the opposite end of the spectrum, Hard, being an utter ball-buster. You can toggle perma-death if you wish, which means you'll lose your gear and character on death, to increase the challenge.
Three game modes are included - Career Mode, where you progress through the heists and work your way up to the Big Score. Quickplay, which allows you to get right in to the action and choose any heist to play, or Arcade mode, where you play a never-ending raid which gets progressively more difficult the longer you last.
You also have different Character Classes, which include Health, Strength, Precision, Stealth, Balance, and Mechanics. Each one promotes a different style of play, from being a tank, to building various types of turrets. You also have two Global Skills which can be chosen no matter what class you are, and these skills offer buffs such as temporarily having an increased rate of fire, turning all ammo drops to medical drops, and the infamous Bullet Time. There are 18 different Global Skills to choose from, and each are all very useful in their own right.
There are a couple of issues however - pressing an arrow key (for me anyway) on the main menu causes the game to instantly crash. The keys are fine ingame however and can be used as an alternative to the WASD control scheme. There is also only one music track on loop ingame, and it can get rather repetitive.
So, to end the review, I would definitely recommend Cash_Out despite these two minor issues, as the game runs great otherwise and I've found it to be a lot of fun. It's incredibly cheap also (almost a heist in itself) and more content should be on the way in the near future (it is Early Access after all.) The developer is active in the forums and will answer any of your questions if you want to know more about the game or if you want to report an issue. Definitely worth trying out.
