The Swindle

To Long, Won’t Read: With all the problems this game faces, I feel like it’s overall a disappointment since this game could have grown a great following and helped introduce so many gamers to this genre (difficult games). But as it stands, I would say it’s probably not for you. If you have experience with difficult roguelikes (or lites), or you have the calmest temperament, you may get by but otherwise stick to more polished games. Detailed: I think this game had something great going for it. Its concept is amazing and enemy variation really keeps you engaged and always learning, but the amount of bugs in this game is just unforgiving especially if you consider that this game is meant to be challenging. Now, with all the bugs, it’s near impossible for those who want to give themselves personal challenges, and a heavy deterrent for new players (especially those new to the “get good” genre). Often times when I failed, it was because of bugs and not my decisions, which is never good as it taints the reward of actually winning when you do. The developers really should have spent more time testing this game. I’ve heard the excuse that the bugs are intentional as it raises the difficulty but that to me feels like Bethesda levels of incompetence since you can incorporate difficulty in better, less lazy ways. Here’s a list of the bugs you can expect: 1. Inconsistent input. Many times, jumps, hack quick time events, and tool selection will not register which will cause about 70% of your failed runs. Considering that these are the most used actions baffles me as to how the developers released the game in this state. 2. Stairs and sloped roofs often don’t register as ground blocks which causes the game to think that you’re falling, making it extremely hard to control your character (when you can). At some points, spike trap enemies will be spawned at the bottom of these blocks which causes the game to think that you fell on them, causing a failed run. 3. Enemy line of sight can clip through doors and armored windows. This is especially troll-like considering that there is a skill you can purchase which allows you to bash enemies through doors tricking you into thinking it’s perfectly fine to hug the wall and wait for an enemy to come close. I’ve yet to actually use that ability more than a few times because of this bug. 4. Finally, level generation is lacking. I’d say over 50% of the generated levels cannot result in a perfect run, and some are just doomed to fail, either because the enemy spawns make it impossible to bypass any room, or the rooms themselves are located kilometers below spawn so you’ll never have enough bombs to blow your way down. This is especially egregious in the Swindle heist (final level) since you’d think the developers would make sure that at least that one had proper generation. To some degree, I feel like the devs knew about this issue because if you fail during the swindle heist, you have to purchase the ability to run it again, but if you escape without alerting anybody and before grabbing it, you can run it again without having to purchase clearance. Maybe I’m reading into it, but I feel like the devs put that in so that, if you run into an unbeatable heist, you can effectively just reset it. That being said, I still don’t consider that a solution.