I've been searching around, trying to find something new to play, and I noticed this game on my Facebook newsfeed, because it's from the same publisher that brought you the various Car Mechanic Simulator games, as well as such treasures as Junkyard Simulator and House Flipper
And the good news is that Thief Simulator releases tomorrow, November 9th! Just the thing to cause you to be able to wait for Just Cause 4 (see what I did there? ) and give you some ideas for those post holiday money crunches. As of right now, there is no price shown.
I've found a pretty good YouTube video showing about 24 minutes of gameplay, narrated by someone who doesn't get on my nerves. And, surprisingly, it looks not half bad. The game that is. The video is actually quite funny and worth a look.
Unfortunately I'm pretty busy tomorrow so I might not get a look at it, but maybe that will allow time for some Steam reviews to be posted. Depending on them, I might pick this up.
My father said that anything is interesting if you bother to read about it - Michael C. Harrold
I've watched a couple videos and it doesn't look awful, but I think it will be mostly a grind just like car mechanic simulator. The same thing over and over again with tiny changes and skill upgrades.
Watched the video, and it seems kind of neat except for the fact that you keep returning to the same neighbourhood. I mean come on, no thief would realistically do that. Just seems careless.
Also somewhat hilariously, when you have nothing in your hands it looks like you're a zombie with your arms straight out.
coopasonic wrote: ↑Sat Nov 10, 2018 2:36 pm
I've watched a couple videos and it doesn't look awful, but I think it will be mostly a grind just like car mechanic simulator. The same thing over and over again with tiny changes and skill upgrades.
That's kind of my concern. Without a story, it starts to look like rather repetitive.
My father said that anything is interesting if you bother to read about it - Michael C. Harrold
I saw this review over on Steam and decided to post part of it since it provides a pretty good description of the gameplay, for those who don't want to sit through a long gameplay video.
You can purchase items using the PC in your den. Lock picks, climbing gloves, safecracking tools, hacking tools, binoculars, micro cameras are all available to buy ranging from $20 to $52000.
You can also sell some of your loot on Blackbay if it is a requested item. You will receive a lot more money for a requested item than just flogging it in the pawn shop so it’s useful to make a note of what is wanted and steal those from houses.
There is also a section for acquiring information where you can purchase tips, possible loot locations and tenant routines. This saves you time if you don’t want to do it yourself.
The last section on your PC advertises jobs for hire which you can choose to accept or ignore for a monetary reward.
In your den is a lockpicking bench where you can practice lock picking, a storage unit where you can dispense loot and items, a hacking terminal for practicing hacking, a jewelry workshop where you can practice dismantling jewelry and a car lift for working on cars.
When accepting any mission if you succeed on the first attempt you will gain a massive bonus of 10 times the experience points, so it is worthwhile being a little careful when approaching the job. Things that will trip you up are leaving your car in a suspicious area, getting caught by a neighbor whilst picking locks, or being seen by a tenant in the house. As soon as you are spotted the police are called and they are on their way. Sirens wail and lights flash on your map to show where the police are approaching from. You can either hide in a closet, dumpster or under a bed or you can try to escape on foot or by car. You will just need to cross over a white boundary line located on your map to escape.
It is much easier to hide however. You can’t hide anywhere else but those three locations as the Police will find you, and you are unable to initiate a car chase because as soon as you are spotted you are arrested. It would have been nice to have a car chase scene but the maps are very small and there’s just not enough room to do so.
Part of the game is surveillance and learning the tenant’s movements to ascertain the best time to rob them. You can forward time by sleeping on your couch at home or in the car and strike when you think the time is right. You can place a mark on a tenant in the house and they will then become highlighted so you can see through walls and watch their movements. There are indicators which give you information as to the number of people in the house and their whereabouts. There also is a colour system or red and blue but I don’t understand the significance of this. On later skill levels you can place cameras in their mail boxes to gain information on their movements too.
If the tenants catch you snooping for too long, they will call the police. When they first see you a green exclamation mark appears above their heads. If you don’t move out of their gaze quick enough the exclamation mark turns red and they call the police. You can purchase a pair of binoculars to study and mark tenants from a distance but there really is no need to.
You can enter properties in a variety of ways. Through the side gate, through the front door, through a window, through a broken fence or even by climbing walls or guttering. You won’t possess all of these skills initially however. Each entrance will have a skill level associated to it. A side gate may require a level one lockpick whilst a front window or door may require a level 4 piece of equipment like a glass cutter or electronic lock pick.
You will need to level up and gain skill points before you can buy the equipment needed and learn the skills to enter through the front window for example. This is where the skill tree comes into play. Every level up earns you a skill point. You can spend these skill points on Agility, backpack capacity, lock picking, appraisal skills, car theft techniques and electronics. Each category has three or four levels and each level introduces you to a new skill.
Agility levels include throwing bricks, climbing vines, carrying larger items faster or climbing gutters; Backpack capacity increases the amount you can carry by 25% a level; Lock picking introduces you to four types of lock including safe cracking and glass cutting; appraisal skills let you recognize more goods within the home, use binoculars and disassemble jewelry; car theft lets you steal cars with or without alarms and electronic locks; Electronics gives you the ability to use PDA or laptops to hack terminals or remove security from devices.
Some of these skills also require you to have reached a certain level and higher levels need more skill points to obtain. For example, a level 1 lock pick skill would take 1 skill point and character level 6, whilst a level 4 lock pick might take 4 skill points and require you to be level 21.
You’ll also need to buy the equipment associated with these skills which costs money. Sometimes a lot of money. Vinny tends to introduce stages gradually and will recommend and steer you into the direction of what skills to acquire first. These usually involve cheaper equipment so it is introduced in a thoughtful way. Vinny introduces you to harder jobs as you progress, with tighter security and less entrance points, making having certain skills a must. There is a bit of grinding to make up levels and gain enough skill points for that next leap but it isn’t too much to become tiresome.
The one really annoying aspect of this game is that there is only partial controller support. You can map keys to your controller but they only help with movement and driving your car. I found that I had to use the mouse and keyboard for certain actions and when picking locks, I had to use the controller and keyboard at the same time! Very tricky. It definitely spoilt the immersion and game play for me.
The movement of neighbors is very unusual also. They walk around the neighborhood on a loop at all times of the night and day. Surely there wouldn’t be that many people walking around at 3am! They also sometimes randomly appear from nowhere and disappear unexpectedly. Sometimes this makes it hard to plan an escape or pick a lock in view of the street.
Parking the car can be frustrating. If you are 1 millimeter in the road it will block traffic and you will get reported. You can’t park outside houses unless you are on the grass or neighbors will report you. The car is a bit awkward to drive also and you have to perform three different tasks to get the car started.
There is not enough stealth involved in robbing homes. You can often run around the houses in plain view of neighbors and they won’t report you. The investigation phase seems a little pointless so far. I just mark them close up and wait for them to go to bed. It is a different matter during the day however.
Environments are quite detailed but the houses are sometimes exactly the same inside. All wardrobes, drawers, rooms look the same. I get the feeling that this is still a game in development. There is a big discussion thread about adding features which the developers contribute to regularly. At the moment the game is definitely playable and holds your attention for a fair while. The lack of controller support is hugely disappointing however.
If you don’t mind playing with keyboard and mouse, and this looks interesting to you then I would certainly give it a try.
My father said that anything is interesting if you bother to read about it - Michael C. Harrold
So I went ahead and picked up the game. I played just over an hour so far and it's actually kind of fun. Vinny, my boss(?) calls me on the phone and walks me through what he wants me to do, essentially the tutorial. I've done several jobs and since I watched that gameplay video I linked above, I knew pretty much what to expect till the last job, where I had to break into a house and break someones toilet(!) and I was otherwise free to grab what I wanted.
And the mission before that, I had to draw out the attention of the cops, so I could practice hiding in a dumpster
So far, knock wood, no glitches or apparent bugs. While Vinny pretty much spelled things out for me on the first jobs, on this last one it was up to me to figure out how to break in, what to locate and how much I could carry. And now I have to pretty much do a job or two on my own, since I have to gain enough XP to upgrade one skill level to do the next assignment from Vinny. So it's totally up to me to figure out what house and what to do. Kind of cool, sort of like Hitman in that you get to decide what to do. Now the game is pretty basic compared to something like Hitman or Payday 2, but it is inexpensive. Also, I do like that I can approach the game now as a sandbox, not being forced to go to this house or that.
More impressions later. Post any questions you may have.
My father said that anything is interesting if you bother to read about it - Michael C. Harrold
So I've played three and a half hours, but it seems longer. As I feared, the game does start to feel repetitive in the gameplay. There is a story, supposedly, but what the game is doing is giving you jobs that require a higher skill, or an expensive piece of kit. So you do more jobs in the interim to get more XP and/or more money. There is some strategy involved, for if you rob items you haven't stolen before you get ten times the XP you normally would. So you might go back to a house more than once to rob it, but each time, even though most of the valuables re-spawn, you'll want to try to find ones you haven't gotten before.
As for the new skills and kit, for example I just completed a job that had me steal some jewelry, but I can't just pawn it. I need to have a kit (which was expensive) to take the jewelry apart and then also the skill (which I get from XP and leveling up) to operate it. So I do a couple of jobs to have enough to be able to accomplish this new goal. And then I get a new goal/job that will require a new piece of kit or skill, and so it goes.
The actually robbery gameplay is where it feels the same. Park the car close by, being sure to leave the driver door and hatchback open for a quicker getaway. Go to the house and then, when there is a gap in passersby, break in and start robbing. You fill the backpack with loot and then can carry one large object. Leave the house unseen and go back to the car. If you are carrying that large object, don't be seen with it, if need be drop it and just wait, apparently nobody notices a painting lying in the grass next to you, as long as you aren't holding it. Then off to the pawn shop.
Now I'm not saying that it's a bad game, and for those who don't mind doing the same type of task over and over, but does have variation in target layout, loot, defenses and location, it can be fun and satisfying. I'm just saying that there's nothing much deeper than that to the game, but then it never promised you more either.
My father said that anything is interesting if you bother to read about it - Michael C. Harrold
coopasonic wrote: ↑Sat Nov 10, 2018 2:36 pm
I've watched a couple videos and it doesn't look awful, but I think it will be mostly a grind just like car mechanic simulator. The same thing over and over again with tiny changes and skill upgrades.
A couple years later I picked it up for $6 in the steam sale (listed at $7 but as I had a partial bundle I got it for $6). I just finished it up this morning. It ended up being a lot more fun and engaging than I had imagined. Yes, it is kind of repetitive, especially in the earlier parts of the game, but the steady flow of new tools and security setups and it just kept getting better. Yeah it was still kind of janky in places (crouching going up concrete stairs almost never works perfectly). I was amused to find they managed to fit car mechanic simulator inside the game, stripping parts for cash. The story is almost hilariously non-existent, but it does exist and it added approximately one minute of amusement to the game... perhaps 90 seconds if you bask in the ending.
) and give you some ideas for those post holiday money crunches. As of right now, there is no price shown.
