Killers and Thieves

Lost to the UI boss. The game's control are very unintuitive and this isn't helped by the lack of any meaningful tutorial. Interactions are also not consistent. It feels like whatever playtesting this game got, it got with the devs standing over thesholders of the play testers instructing them how to play the game. Also the guard AI is weird as ♥♥♥♥. Why are guards patrolling inside multiple buildings? Why does me running into a building not trigger reaction, but leaving one door open causes them to stare for eternity at it? Speaking of which, the game has a really poor mechanic where when a character is stealthed in a room they have a non-replinshable stealth meter that slowly ticks until they're exposed. The problem with this mechanic is that there is no real way manipulate the guard AI and it for some reason likes to just stand and stare at random rooms for long periods of time. If you got unlucky and it's staring at the room you're in, the only way to rescue your thief is to send the one thief you get that stabs things, to stab the crap out of the guard. Overall despite the pretty art, lore, and concept, this is clearly a game that could've used the early access treatment to catch these issues. This is definetly not ready for a 1.0 release.

Concept is great, art is decent, and the "music" is a short loop of soul grating noise playing over and over. The game seems to be unable to decide wether it wants to be a strategic RPG(ish), or a fast paced RTS. But instead of an inventive and fun mix of the two, they've taken the worst aspects of both genres and mashed them together to make an incredibly frustrating experience. You just can't have such an unbelievable inconvenient UI and control scheme in such a fast paced game. There are lots of strange things about the gameplay itself that might have made sense with a better tutorial. Why is the fighting character unable to win against a single guard? Why can't any of the other party member help her fight? Why do the thieves not try to stay hidden automatically? When is that ever not better than being visible? Again, there might be an explanation for these things, but the tutorial doesn't bloody tell you. After inevitably failing the initial training heist, I was simply dumped into the main game seemingly without any way to attempt the training mission again. This product would've needed at least another six months of testing imo. Do not buy unless you are severely masochistic.

[h1]OVERVIEW[/h1] Killers and Thieves is a thieves' guild management game from Alex Thomas, one of the co-creators of indie hit, The Banner Saga. In Killers and Thieves you take control of a small group of thieves building a new guild, intent on becoming an underground power in the fictional mediaeval city of Greypool. [h1]Graphics[/h1] The game begins with a nice-looking title screen and a dark, animated graphic-novel style cut scene introducing the protagonists. These set the scene well, and the graphical production values look very high indeed. The meat of the game is the heist mode, which is played in 2D, from a side-on view, like a traditional platformer. The level details are nice, with a really good atmosphere created by the darkness, weather, and appropriate-looking buildings. But the characters are rather small and look quite basic, with most thieves, citizens, and guards looking very similar. Given the detail that's been paid to the management screens and the buildings, it seems strange for the characters to be so minimal. There's a zoom effect, but the difference between minimum and maximum is small enough for it to be almost pointless. The management screens are all nicely drawn, with some nice animated touches to the map screens. The management interface is quite easy to use, once you get the hang of it, though a few more tutorial screens wouldn't have hurt. The heist interface, too, looks quite nice, but is actually rather hard to use, given the pacing of this part of the game. Graphic options are limited to resolution and full screen / windowed mode selection. [h1]Sound[/h1] The game has mostly good music that fits each part well. The introductory music is dark and foreboding, like the scene itself. The heist music, though quite a repetitive sort of riff, also fits the action well, with a sort of progressive feel to it. The safe house and management screen music is more mellow, but also fits the style of game well. Sound effects are very limited, and essentially amount to guards saying "Hmmm" loudly, and lots of swishing and metal clashing sounds when you end up in combat. They're a bit disappointing, really. But the rain sounds nice. The game has some voice work in the cut scenes. Candle's voice is lovely and fits her profile picture very well. [h1]Gameplay[/h1] The game has two modes: management and heists. The management mode is all essentially turn based, with no time limits hurrying your movements or limiting your options. The game measures time in days, with certain actions or missions taking a set number of days, and expenses requiring payment on a weekly basis. The focus here tends to be on maximising the use of your thieves so they don't sit around idle for too long. In this mode you manage your guild from your safe house in the Patron Tavern, with training, recruitment, sales of loot, stakeouts, and various side- and story- missions being available at different times. Your guild grows as you hire more members, but the heists can usually only be completed with a maximum of four thieves at a time, so choose your training wisely. The heist mode is the action part of the game, where you take your chosen thieves into Greypool to steal from the unwary (or kill them, if you prefer). This is played in real time, and is quite fast paced -- and unfortunately, rather hard to control. Each thief has certain abilities that allow him or her to perform different actions, such as picking locks or fighting. But the core of the heists is the stealth mechanic: each thief has a set number of suspicion points, which reduce when citizens or guards see you inside buildings, or drop to zero instantly when you enter combat. These points never recover inside a heist, so if one lowly peasant in a quiet room at one end of the map sees you robbing a chest, then every guard on the map instantly knows you're up to no good. Combat itself is very basic, and rather boring. Only thieves with the knife fighting ability can fight, which effectively involves drawing your knife and swinging repeatedly at your attacker. It seems to be very strongly based on luck, with some guards dropping like flies and others being invincible tanks. Apart from the too-basic nature of these fights, there are also two big problems with them: once you start, you can't stop: you either win, die, or are captured; and as soon as a guard sees your knife, your stealth instantly drops to zero for the rest of the heist, even if you drop him without anyone else seeing you. Each heist is essentially an exercise in minimising attrition. Stealth points continually drop when people see you, until they hit zero and every guard on the map tries to capture or kill you. Hit points are reduced with each combat. And even your inventory space decreases with each item picked up. None of these values can be recovered during a heist, so when your stealth is gone, your hit points are gone, or you have no room left, it's time to escape. If you can. For some reason, a thief peering through a keyhole can see everything in the room, no matter how large or small, except for whether any other doors in the room are open or closed. Even if a door is five steps away directly across the room, you still can't tell whether it's open or closed until you open the door. So you open the door, the probabilities collapse, and Schrodinger's Door is revealed to you -- most often open and providing clear line of sight for a guard looking right at you. Line of sight matters -- a lot -- and having doorways through which you can't see when using the keyholes puts you at a distinct disadvantage, especially since guards can see you across half the map if you happen to leave a stray window open. Not only is this keyhole issue illogical and frustrating, but not being able to tell whether anyone will see you as soon as you open a door turns a game that should be a game of skill into a game of luck. Couple that with the broken stealth mechanic and the guards being telepathically linked to one another, and it's far more frustrating than fun. Other issues that I found frustrating were many: controls that are very hard to use, guards that spawn in already-cleared areas, no mid-mission saving, broken pathing, activities taking longer than they should, and buildings that just don't make any sense. The list goes on. This last issue is probably worth describing further, too. Each mission has a number of buildings, but they're just a collection of rooms with no logic behind them: bedrooms, empty closet-like rooms, studies ... there's no obvious structure or purpose to any of the building layouts or contents, and no explanation as to why citizens are happy to have guards aimlessly wandering through their bedrooms at night. Though the city graphics are very nice and the graphical detail is good, this lack of cohesion makes it all feel rather random and pointless. Finally, there seems to be a game-breaking bug where your save can be discarded if the game doesn't exit properly, or that's the way it seems. I killed the game from the taskbar and when I restarted again, 'Continue' took me back to just after the opening practice mission, losing hours of progress. [h1]PROS AND CONS[/h1] Pros: + Mostly very nice art + Great idea + Fun abilities + Steam Trading Cards Cons: - Frustrating line-of-sight, combat, and stealth mechanics - Repetitive gameplay - Awkward controls - Buggy [h1]CONCLUSION[/h1] I really wanted to love Killers and Thieves. But after only a handful of hours I'm already too frustrated with it to want to start again. With work on the stealth mechanic, guard telepathy, combat, line of sight, and pathing, it could be a great game. But there's a fair bit of work to be done. Autosave Save Save for Later [h1]Pause[/h1] Quit Rage Quit Note: I received this game for free for review purposes. This did not influence my review. [code]For more game reviews, visit [url=http://saveorquit.com/]Save or Quit[/url].[/code]

I bought this game despite reading several of the negative reviews and watching some YouTube playthroughs - that should tell you that you have an attractive game story and concept. The characaters are interesting, with just enough lead-ins to leave the player wanting to know more, and the goal of the guild makes this more than just a sidescrolling Thief. These are good things. You just need to polish the game to address all of the completely valid criticism the game is receiving with regards to gameplay design and bugs. The lack of a forums denies any form of feedback except Steam reviews - which is NOT where you want bugs and gameplay balance issues aired out. Here are a few additional critiques: 1. Until the bugs and gameplay mechanics are ironed smooth, PERMADEATH is excessively detrimental to basic play testing and you WILL lose what players you attract. Only the most masochistic are going to continue to wade through campaign ending imbalances and bugs. I suggest adding a "Restart Heist" to soften how much the game punishes players due to its current state. 2. Certain skills like Eavesdropping and Climbing are poorly implemented with short durations and excessive cooldowns given the current state of the game. It is unclear if these skills can be boosted by stats. Given how slowly the UI renders, having the Climb skill abruptly deactivate can result in the thief automatically entering a guard-occupied room or a falling death. 3. Climbing Bug / Poor Implementation - a climbing thief cannot manually drop from the 2nd floor to street level, he has to wait for the skill to time out. This can result in poorly executed escapes in a game that heavily punishes combat (it is almost never worth pursuing combat, despite the campaign forcing you to seek it out occassionally). 4. Acrobatics Bug - unable to jump right-to-left, despite UI context icon correctly appearing. Clicking the icon results in thief attempting to walk to the point. 5. Acrobatics Bug - when two or more thieves attempt to jump out of a window (1st-3rd floors) at the same time, the player permenantly loses control of one of the thieves. The fact that players like myself are taking the time to provide constructive criticism proves the passion and interest your game has stoked in the audience, you just need to polish the turd until it is no longer a turd.

The "Heist" mode, the action-oriented gameplay of the game, plays a lot like This War of MIne's scavanger runs. Outside of the those the game seems to offer more world exploring and rpg-like character building for those willing to look around and work past the controls. The terrible, god-awful control mapping is the biggest blunder of the game for me and my limited play time. Pausing requires you to press 'P', hide from guards by pressing 'H', the thieves are bound to number keys, while the camera is controlled using your mouse - meanwhile, spacebar does nothing and the devs have decided not to include options to rebind anything. Edit: I just want to make it clear that the game itself doesn't seem bad, it's something I would enjoy very much, if the controls weren't so counter-intuitive, but controls and interface in a game really can make or break it.

Since I've only just gotten it, I'll play further at a later point and edit this review as needed. For now, I will say that I sort of liked my time with Killers and Thieves, and while it has issues(Mainly the lack of tutorial, questionable controls,and civilian/guards being incredibly simple), it is still decent, though very much overpriced for what it does at this point. Edit: Further playing reveals a much greater problem still- A complete lack of replayability. Once you've seen one or two randomly generated maps, you've seen it all. There doesn't seem to be much more than that, not even story wise. After a few more hours of trying, it feels very much like a flash game with a great concept and no substance. it's neat and has potential, but it will never realize that potential and become great. Quite sad, but that's how many great concepts go. My time with it is best summed up by analogy; You get yourself a new bathtub installed, paid for it and finally want to use it to relax. You step in and the bathtub is too small for you to fit in it, so you awkwardly stand in it trying to take a shower. Then you get a phonecall. The shower was nice, but it only just started and now you're interupted. The phone call was someone trying to order a pizza with the wrong number. You go back to your shower and try to enjoy it when you get called again. someone else trying to order a pizza. This repeats for a few hours and you never get the water to heat up so you have to just take a cold shower and then you turn it off and go do something else. All the while you're left thinking about the wonderful warm bath you've been promised. Original review follows; Killers and Thieves puts the player in control of a medieval thieves' guild, an interesting idea that might have needed a bit more explaining and working out. As it stands, it is still worth looking at, but it does feel like it could have used a bit more thought at a lot of points. The story seems pretty good, but the day to day business of robbing places, training your thieves and selling loot feels like it is lacking a bit and often feels clumsy and obtuse. The controls for your thieves are not very intuitive, and the stealth system not regenerating any points once you've lost them makes it impossible to enter stealth again after being spotted. But that is just one of the systems that feels too simple to me. Perhaps I just expected too much, but so far I've not yet found any unique looking maps. Everything appears to be randomised, even the story missions I've found thus far. While it seems like a lot of effort was put in the presentation, into looks and mood, into the story itself and the concept, it doesn't seem like this effort was placed on connecting the story to the game. An early example is a story mission telling me to rob a place to put pressure on someone, the map was randomly generated, so I just went in and stole a bunch of stuff. With multiple houses there, I had no idea where I was supposed to go. But it turned out the answer was "Anywhere", as stealing from any of the houses counted. Then in a the story afterward the man's house was robbed, yet I couldn't picture the house as everything seemed to just be randomly generated. While the graphics are good with a consistent, pleasant to look at style that isn't difficult to tell guards and loot apart from the background, the sound is maybe a bit too simple, with music and soundbites seemingly repeated over and over. This got a bit annoying after a while, which I found to detract from the general experience. They can certainly use more variety for the audio. Guard AI, for a stealth based game, is fairly important. It is then sad that it is so simplistic. Guards seem to move at random, and stand still at random. This means that if you're unlucky, you're going to be stuck in a room for a long time waiting for the guards to move away. They often patrol in buildings randomly, wandering through bedrooms of slums and standing at random staircases in the middle of a house. There doesn't seem to be any sense, which leads me to believe the guard patrols are probably also randomly generated. The RPG elements are slow, and you will need to level up a lot in order to get the training points needed to make your thieves capable of doing their job properly, and even then there are often not many ways you can use the skills in the maps as they are, even if you actively look for them. I like the idea of growing my band of thieves from poorly skilled randoms from the street to a group of elite heisters, but the leveling up, learning of skills and trying to make thieves better just doesn't seem to matter most of the time. Not to mention that it takes forever to get even the slightest upgrade. It feels like they've had a great idea, but didn't really know how to turn it into a great game. So they got a story that seems good so far, and they've made some gameplay for it. But they don't seem to have really made it fit well together with the story, and the gameplay elements often appear to conflict in their goals. The numerous flaws in the game seem to break immersion quite often, and the sheer randomness of everything makes planning impossible. Controlling four thieves at the same time with the clumsy controls means you're likely to just leave three outside and use one at a time. I like the idea, I like the art, and it seems like a lot of work went into the story. But the gameplay feels lacking in many ways. It is essentially the looting and exploration part of This War of Mine with slight changes to it, randomly generated every time and with an overworld system that doesn't seem to really do much anyway. Many things regarding the gameplay feel like they've not been thought about, leading to what feels like a patchwork of mechanics and systems that interact at times, but never truly work together to provide a great immersive and challenging experience. It is worth getting and playing at some point, and you may very well end up enjoying it like I do. But I can see that it has big issues that would make it a frustrating and poor experience for many, so definitely do not get it at full price.

When I first got this game I couldn't stop playing it. However, 25+ hours in, it's losing its lustre quickly. Those 25+ hours though were definitely worth it. So let me put it like this: Pros: - Stealth puzzle gameplay is fun and addictive. - Thieve's guild management is something I'm really into. - Immersive heist missions. - Solid and challenging learning curve. Cons: - Micro-management of money with loading times. - Repetitive art assets. Probably the biggest reason why it will start to feel repetitive. - No chance of 0 murder runs. I feel less like a sleek thief and more like a grubby bandit. Despite these cons though, I still recommend playing it... as well as waiting for some good future patches!

The game was so promising in the beginning. The trailer introduction video, first layout you see when you begin playing the game, and the seemingly challenging first mission. And then it falls flat. I've begun playing this game not long after this was released on Steam, but instead of fixing things or adding quality-of-life improvements, every single patch ended up breaking functional parts as well as creating new incompatibility issues and introducing never before seen bugs. If you gloss over all kinds of bugs and technical mismatches in the game (and the surprisingly lacking in-game descriptions and tutorials), you will still run into a brick wall of boredom and unentertaining lack of freedom. The game is advertised as a "rogue" game that supposedly offers lots of different choices. Myself and other players who have logged multiple hours will tell you otherwise. You will always end up building a single super stealth oriented skill tree after realizing how frustratingly ineffective all other methods are. Sure, you can still pull off successful heists, but good luck in maintaining your sanity and please take good care of your fingernails when you are constantly biting it off while you try to whisk away an unfair RNG that massively penalizes you for your foolish attempt. This is also ignoring how just about every single heist mission is essentially the same overall premise, same overall layout, and same overall obvious traps of the game engine trying to jab you in the throat. I have waited multiple months until the devs (or pardon, me, a single developer) would pick up the pieces from where it's been decided to abandon the project and fix some of the most simple issues. I believe now is the time for me to give up.

There's so much potential here but this game doesn't reach it. This game was left with several issues that were never addressed before the developer left and never came back. About 4 months ago i made a list of several suggestions for this game, here's my list if you want to know what i think is wrong with the game. http://steamcommunity.com/app/382330/discussions/0/3223871682607861530/

I don't normally give bad reviews anywhere but... this game is a buggy mess that was abandoned by the devs, who have no intention of ever returning to fix things up. There are multiple game-breaking bugs that required I start a new game. There are bugs that prevent your characters from moving - they just come to a stand still and you lose control of them. Training thieves sometimes makes them lose a LOT of points in a stat for no discernable reason. There's really a lot of bugs that just flat out interfere with gameplay and force you to restart a new game or restart a level. The art is very well-done and the animations are great. My only problem with the art is, the heists all look the same wherever you go. The heists in poorest section of the city look identical and indistinguishable from the wealthiest section of the city, differing only in height and width of the buildings. The game background never changes, the music is the same all the way through the game which lead me to play spotify in the background instead. The plot was great at the onset of the game, but toward the end it was apparent that the devs had rushed the ending to get the product out. The ending made absolutely no sense, has no closure, left so many loose ends and left more questions than when I had started the game in the first place. I really, really wanted this game to be good - I love stealth games and thief games, I love having a character that runs around and steals things. I'm just deeply disappointed this game was so buggy, rushed, and unfinished. I'm hoping against hope that if the devs don't revisit this title, perhaps the fandom can tinker with it. Who knows?