Relooted

This game fascinates me. At a first glance it looks like a platformer, running, vaulting and jumping are what you spend most of your time doing while playing. But it's actually a heist game, just expressed through platformer mechanics. After a briefing of your target for the mission, you enter a planning mode in which you observe the location through a remote, controllable camera, with some but not all points of interest marked by other team members. You get a look at your targets, the routes through the building, and then you assign team members. Only then do you enter the parkour-platformer portion of a heist, running, jumping and sliding through the place you just saw from a distance. It can be a little limited, each type of obstacle only really has one way to get past it. I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing though, it might be disappointing for people looking for complete control or freedom, but the end result is a very tight, guided game. And you do get some choice of approach, later missions give you multiple possible routes, including for your entrance, exit, and how you approach some parts in the middle of a building, and will introduce limits to how often you can deploy team members for assistance, forcing you to plan ahead and place them strategically. It's just that they're more puzzles to be solved than open worlds to be broken apart. Regardless, I thought it did a very good job of linking the planning and the execution, really bringing the feel of a heist together. The other thing I particularly appreciate is the pacing and how mechanics are introduced. There's a lot to pay attention to, and in light of that I think the game does a very good job of teaching. Early on you're just doing platforming. Then they introduce the scout drone and the planning ahead of your route. Your first in-heist ally just opens locks for you, and then they trickle in others with more complex options as you get used to the systems. It takes a few missions before you need to assess and pick your entrances and escape routes. They do have training missions, little simulations or set pieces demonstrating and letting you get a feel for how different things work. They're sprinkled throughout though and are folded into the pace of the game. For other things, I really liked the dialogue and character interactions, finding them entertaining and well paced to add details without overstaying their welcome. The setup is really fun, a well put together heist game about seeing long standing injustices and taking matters into your own hands to right those wrongs and bring important cultural pieces back to their homes. The story itself and the graphics, I wasn't as enthused by but they hardly get in the way. A big generic, but they work pretty well and serve as a find supporting bits of a great game. I only have a few small issues. It's a bit short, you have the main 'episodes' which include a heist or two and maybe some smaller set-piece style missions alongside. I don't think a shorter campaign is a problem in itself, I felt it was a good length, but other than replaying the same missions to grab things or complete challenges you missed the first time, once it's done it's over. Mileage may vary here, I only needed several tries on the later missions, and I was playing on the default difficulty, so higher difficulties or less experience with the sorts of mechanics or concepts at play might need more struggle and thus last longer. Somekind of other mode where once could play around with mechanics in new ways would be a nice addition, though I'm not sure exactly what it would look like. Otherwise, there were a few things where things could be signaled to the player better, a few spots where the controls were a little fiddly where multiple interactable things overlapped, and there was one level that could leave you trapped in particular rooms depending on your setup, requiring restarts in ways none of the previous levels seemed to. These are all minor though. Overall, I think it's a good game, with cool ideas and a well-done execution. If you're at all interested in the type of game it is, it is definitely worth a look.