Snap & Grab

The game's cute, but it's got problems that are pretty immediately apparent. The immediate point of comparison is Hitman, especially the World of Assassination trilogy, and while that is very clearly the general mechanical structure this game is aiming at, I think it misses the mark by a pretty wide margin. So, the main gimmick here is that you are casing a heist target by posing as a photographer, taking pictures of your score and various key elements of the job and then using those picture to plan out the heist for your crew. So, say there's a big gemerald in a locked room. You'll wander around the map until you find a key for the room, take a picture, add it to the plan with a note "Grab the key," then you'll take a picture of the door, add it to the plan marked to use the key on the door, take a picture of the gemerald, add it to the plan so someone will pick it up, then you push the Start Heist button and watch it play out. First off, this becomes incredibly clunky, especially as the game only saves "important" pictures, so if you have to change the plan later, you'll almost certainly have to run back to an area and re-shoot an element so you can add it to your plan. But the biggest issue here is that there are absolutely literally no stakes. Fail the heist because there was a guard you didn't notice? That's fine, you just go right back to the play field and can add the guard to the plan. It quickly devolves into trial-and-error rather than putting a fun heist plan together and you can't skip the animations of the heist taking place, so if you're trying to get it to work and there's one element you can't quite nail, you're gonna have to watch the same thing play out over and over until you get it right. So I guess there technically are stakes, it's just that the stakes are "How many times can you watch the same (extremely janky) animations while listening to bad 80s pastiche music before you lose your entire mind?" There is an extremely limited stealth system, a very VERY watered-down version of Hitman's disguise mechanic which largely involves throwing fruit at people so their hats pop off and you can put them on. Half the time, though, not doing that and just walking around in restricted areas is fine. It feels like either nobody really notices or, even if they do and they call the guards, you can just. Walk out. Just go over there. And it's fine. And even if you do get caught, you just get teleported out of the area and can try again because there are no stakes. I've mentioned it a few times, but there really is just a thin layer of jank overlaying everything in this game. And, look, I'm no stranger to jank, I understand making video games is incredibly complicated, but this isn't the kind of jank that makes a game endearing, this isn't eurojank, this is just a game never fully working properly. Animations lack transitions, sometimes the heist photo animations will break entirely, there's the stuff with the restricted areas I already talked about, it's just never fully there. The first time I booted up the game there was sound on the No Goblin logo screen and then absolutely no sound at all, but restarting the game fixed it. The game never actually pauses, it just brings up a menu, and I genuinely can't tell if this is intentional or not because aside from the cutscenes (which I'll get to in a minute), it doesn't matter. Hitman's whole Thing, especially, again, World of Assassination, is the "clockwork world" concept, the idea that you're in a huge diorama where there are a million schedules happening and then resetting (most of the time), allowing you to get to know the routines and patterns of a map as you do different objectives, try for different kills, or just look for secrets. This game copies the large number of objectives but it entirely lacks the "clockwork world" part that makes Hitman so fun and engaging. The current map is a big penthouse party and everyone is just standing around. Everyone. There's no schedules, there's no patrol routes, there's nothing. There's guards in a set spot and a bunch of NPCs who do nothing. It makes coming back to the same map over and over so boring, even as the objectives take you to different areas of the map, because nothing is HAPPENING. This last point is extremely subjective and I recognize that but good GOD I couldn't stand the writing in this game. Sometimes zoomers will talk about how a game or a movie or whatever is "for millennials" and mean it in a derisive way and this is the first time I've understood what they meant. It's going for a very cartoonish, over-the-top, campy style, but you can't MAKE camp happen. It has to arise naturally. If you try to force camp, you just get whatever this is. The whole cat-and-mouse thing, the detective who knows the thief did it but can't prove it, the thief who plays entirely innocent the entire time, it's a well-worn trope, but one that's still fun if it's done right and this even adds to it by making the detective very gay for the thief and I can't even enjoy cat-and-mouse cop/thief lesbians because the writing IS SO BAD. They ruined the lesbians!! Wow, okay, this one extremely got away from me but I guess I had a lot to say. I wanted to enjoy this game, I really did, and maybe some of the issues can be resolved in future patches or later episodes. I hope they can. But some of them are too deep, too central to the design of the game to fully be able to iron out. Ultimately I really am just disappointed with this one. It could've been something, I think. Maybe it still can. But I don't think I'm gonna stick around to find out.

This game has an amazing concept behind it. It's pretty fun for a few hours, the characters and writing are decent, but very goofy, and I'm sure a lot of love and effort went into it, but the execution to me feels a little bit lacking. Notably to me is the hub area, which is straight up jank, and honestly feels kind of like they had no time to make a dedicated one since it's literally just the first level but empty. There are spots to display your spoils, but almost every spot is either off center, rotated weirdly (such as diagonally), clipping the surface it's on, or all three, including some of the spots dedicated to mission items. It's also dead silent in the hub. There may be a record player around there somewhere but I didn't find it. The heist mechanics are also lacking depth. If you distract a guard for instance, they're distracted for the rest of the plan. The game also doesn't take much (if any) pathing into account because every NPC aside from like one dog is static, and only react to things that happen immediately around them. This means that as long as you distract the (usually) single guard who's watching whatever you're going for you can just pick it up and instantly exit the level. It can be fun planning an elaborate heist but in reality you can get most things in just those 3 steps. distract guard > grab item > leave. There are a few items that are harder to get than that, but those are mostly the ones highlighted through the dedicated missions. Animations and camera angles break when performing actions all the time, and quite often you'll be able to see the thing you've just picked up hovering in frame if the next action happens to be nearby. Arms can and will contort badly depending on what you pick up, and some stated object interactions just don't work. For instance if you snap a picture of the grill, it states that it will thaw frozen meat but it actually does nothing to frozen meat. It can only burn raw food. There is a thaw option on the frozen meat, but you need to be holding an item to activate the command. There are no items that I found that can thaw meat. Add on to the fact that this is 7.99 for each of the 5 episodes (apparently) and you get a very ambitious but pretty broken game with the fairly substantial price tag of 39.95 in the end.

The vibes? Immaculate. The concept? Incredible. The gameplay? Fun.

This game is not going to dodge the Hitman comparisons. It takes out the execution aspect and fully focusses on planning. I feel like its presentation got more love than the gameplay though. It's not bad, it's just that it feels messily designed. From just that I'd give it a soft recommendation. I do however very briefly want to express my confusion on its monetisation. 8 euros seems like a good deal for a game like this, but what you might not realise is that you buy the first chapter for this price, which is just one level. The future four chapters have yet to be released and probably fall in at the same price point. Which means that this is a 40 euro game. And I don't think so. This is a 20 euro product at best. Maybe 25 if this was slightly better designed. Rebranding your levels as "chapters" and putting them as a dlc paywall is very 2010, and frankly in bad taste. And with that I have to unfortunately leave this at a negative review. It's a shame. I do enjoy this game, I think it's pretty decent, but what would've otherwise been a just positive review is now a negative one.

The vision here is so strong! There are definitely rough edges that need to be polished, but GOSH, I want to see them be polished. The premise is really fun, the characters are lovable as all hell, and I personally love the whole vibe it's going for. Also the lesbians, the lesbians help. You can tell there's been a lot of love poured into the game, and frankly it's contagious. I really, really hope the devs are able to fully realise their passion, because I'm invested now!

I like the campiness, but the puzzles just feel bad. They're simultaneously too easy and too hard. Solutions are usually very simple, but sometimes a solution fails and I'd just have no idea why because the mechanics are so opaque. So there's a lot of trial and error where I'd watch repetitive and unskippable cutscenes of the henchmen, trying to figure out what the heck the game wants. And eventually I'd give up and try a different stupidly simple solution that happens to work. Every single heist was like this.

Its a very lovely game! In short its a wonderful mixture of Hitman, Pokemon Snap and Ghost Trick. You wander the level as Nifty taking pictures. You then use those pictures to conduct a heist. My favourite thing is that if you mess up a step in a heist it is so easy to try again. There is just so much potential to replay, try out silly ideas, and watch those little guys do their things. I am looking forward to seeing what they come up with in the future chapters :)! Only downside is that Nifty said my picture of a penguin plushie was an accidental. Silly Nifty all plushie pictures are VERY important.

Really fun concept for a game that is executed very well! Its fun and relatively laid back, characters are fun and im excited to see where future episodes take it

Easily the best game from No Goblin yet! Their games are always incredibly charming and fun. The music and style help me love this a ton, as well as the heist nature of it You play this a bit like Hitman, minus Cheffo, but instead of planning out kills you are trying to take photos for a heist and tell your crew how to act out a heist to get away with your goods. You can take anything that's nailed down from food, drinks, statues, paintings, corgis, furniture. I have been having so much fun with the game I look forward to 100%ing each map in time. PS Your games and sarge.club marathons are one of the reasons I ended up getting my own corgi named Loafie in November of last year, who recently turned 1! They truly are the bestest doggos

Honestly game is very well made, and from just intro/song and all the little drawn animation it really shows that people really cared about making this game and it is a shame to see it only has 50 reviews. Game is not your triple A extreme theme park like the obvious comparison to Hitman, it is a smaller "In/out" mission were you got an X item to steal and you need to make a plan with trial and error to do it. So far on a simpler side altho still you do need to use a brain a bit, but it seem you will get a large crew down the line, so we will have to see how complicated of a planning phase this will become. Honestly I was very inffie on buying it originally because of episode structure, but at this point I will probably be getting other episodes as soon as they come out. While not right now, but game will probably benefit of doing some sort of free trial/demo or even giving the episode 1 for free once 3-4 episodes are out.