Monaco 2 Steam Charts & Stats

Compared to the first game, Monaco 2 is much harder to stealth perfectly. The game is much more about surviving hectic and sometimes unavoidable mistakes. After initially being baffled by how some abilities were league's better than others, I saw that with the right upgrades, and specific situations, each character is useful, if still quite unequally. It's a different take than the first game, but I enjoyed it with friends, despite the occasional annoyance at its jank, camera, and no longer being primarily a stealth game.

I've had a lot of fun playing this with a friend of mine. I really liked the first game and I also really love this one. Lots of polish to this sequel, as well.

Let me preface this by saying that I enjoyed my time with Monaco 2 for the most part. There's a reason I have nearly 200 hours in it. However, given the current state of the game, I do not expect others to get the same level of enjoyment out of it that I did and thus cannot recommend it. Firstly, let's address the biggest problem. Monaco 2 is branded as a *co-op* heisting game. Unfortunately, despite only releasing about 3 months ago (at the time of this review), the game is basically already dead online. The steam player count is currently struggling to get above 10. Even if you do find a lobby online, you cannot join a heist in progress and can only join at the start of the mission (though you can spectate heists in progress). This isn't something exclusive to Monaco 2, but heists in this game can last a *very* long time, and it's not uncommon for first time players to take half an hour to an hour to beat some of the larger missions. Basically, don't go into this expecting to play with randoms. Multiplayer is great and a lot of fun, but if you want the multiplayer experience you'll need to coordinate with friends or people on the discord. As for the gameplay itself, it's pretty good. Monaco 2 is a stealth game, but it's kind of expected that you'll be seen and chased at numerous points. Sneaking isn't all or nothing, there isn't any kind of penalty for getting detected or a trophy for going undetected. You get to sneak around as a cast of 8 characters, who have different abilities and unlockable passives, and it can be fun to coordinate ability uses together or approach the same problem in different ways because of differing abilities. You can even change characters mid heist at checkpoints. The problem is that you don't get to pick from the full cast. Each level has a set of four heisters chosen by the devs and you can only pick from those four, regardless of who you should have access to at this point in the campaign. So you may have a favorite character/play style, but just aren't able to play as them in a level for no good reason. Aside from that, the game can have severe difficulty problems. Sometimes the game is way too easy and you will be swimming in extra lives. Other times there are some particularly awful rooms (such as the final rooms of Mission 5) that will drain all your lives. (NOTE: Mission 5 actually got patched recently to make it easier, but the ending still seems very difficult for new players). Either way, typically just beating a level isn't very hard as you can brute force it with certain character abilities or tools. The harder challenges involve going for some extra goals such as: "Clean it Out" (grab all the loot), "Smash and Grab" (finish in a short time), and earning a Silver/Gold/Greedy Rank (grabbing as much as possible while going fast). Clean It Out is something you could realistically do on your first playthrough as there's no time limit. Smash and Grab can require some good planning or knowledge of game mechanics. But by far the biggest challenge is Greedy ranks, which are frankly way too difficult for your average player, especially solo. These were the biggest time sink for me and were more frustrating than fun due to strict time requirements on large levels necessitating near perfect play and routing just to get close. Other things: -The music is great and I'll listen to the soundtrack on Youtube from time to time. -A lot of mechanics are not properly tutorialized (Smoke Bombs are way more powerful than just losing guards, Explosives can destroy doors and lasers, you can pick up sleeping guards and store them in hiding places to remove them from the map, etc.). -The story is okay at first, then just gets nonsensical. The main four have everything they want by the halfway point and the game both acknowledges this and then promptly ignores it and makes them keep going anyway. The last five missions or so feel very rushed, as there's a lot of plot threads you don't get a resolution on. Characters inexplicably survive something that absolutely should've killed them, one of the heisters should be frankly untouchable by the guards near the end but is treated like nothing special, and the game has to shoehorn a character into a certain mission at the end because there needs to be four heisters to pick from. At the end of the day, if you've got some friends to play it with and it's on a good sale, I'd say go for it, but right now it has a litany of problems that keep me from being able to recommend it to someone who isn't already interested in the series.

Genuinely not as fun as the predecessor. Monaco 1, is WAAAAAAAAY more understandable, me and my daughter played this together and were completely lost in what to do. This is a game the developers made more because of "can we`?" instead of "would this actually be fun?" The graphics here are an actual hindrance to what is going on. If you make a game about managing chaos, maybe dont make the environment impossible to read, we spent most of the time thinking: what is going on here? why did i die? where did i mess up?