Monaco 2 Steam Charts & Stats

Fun game with friends

Amazing Heist game. Specially co-op.

It's fun, 83/100, I would have Increased my rating if it had a level maker or more content, this is a great $17.97 game, (this review might be updated once I checked a future update).

Like Monaco 1, great game. The 3D perspective with semi-new classes is a great idea for a sequel. Like Monaco 1, it takes a bit to get used to - it can be tricky to track coins in the new perspective. There is a planning stage at the beginning, and you can refer to your map at any time, but planning seems completely pointless at the beginning for everything but story atmosphere (which ends up being a negative - a bit of a "duhh let's just go" moment every level). The map works to find leftover coins later in the level which is great. For some reason, if your character is looking at the map and you're attacked or killed, you will not be warned or jolted out of the map - you'll just be none the wiser until you exit the map. I left feedback about this on discord 3.5 months before this review, and it's still in the game like this. Like Monaco 1, you play as one of 4 classes in every level and these get mixed up depending on the level - love it, classic Monaco feels. This time around they get trinkets to further uniqueify them, and you unlock trinkets by playing levels with shorter times and more coins. This progression falls over a bit here, and the most effective way to progress is a hard grind of the very easy first level using the new procedurally generated alternative seeds (which is very cool, albeit subtle). You get a new trinket with an alternative way to play your class at 1 gem, 2 gems, 5 gems and 10 gems, in that sequence. So to get the last skill-based trinket, you need to spend 19 gems per class, over 8 classes. The first level takes 3-10 minutes as a sort of tutorial level, and from about the third level onwards, you can expect to play for an hour or two depending on your speedrunning skill. I don't think the extra gems you get are worth the extra time and effort you spend on those much more difficult levels. Importantly, the trinkets don't seem to get better with each tier - each character's trinkets are very hit and miss. Some you'll probably never want to use unless you want to challenge yourself, and those aren't the highest-level trinkets. It's not like you have a weaker trinket at tier 1 that you'll use until you unlock a better trinket at tier 2. What makes this stranger, is that every trinket has a health-based penalty, with higher tier trinkets costing as much or more health than the last tier. This would only make sense if the higher tier trinkets were always better. There's multiple better ways to have done this, like just having the option to unlock any trinket at any point once you have enough gems (let's say 4 gems per tier). Then unlocking more trinkets would feel less like something you have to do and more like a bonus for experimenting as long as you like. One character in particular seems to have no value at all. Her ability is a dash, but it barely moves you out of the way of whatever you're dashing away from or towards any faster than walking, and she has trinkets that are as expensive as any other character to do things you'd expect her dash to do - like dodge damage. Every other game has a dodge roll, why do I need to spend 19 gems to do that with this character? That ability should be free, and this highest-tier ability should be replaced with something else. Let me ricochet ranged attacks back to my attackers during dashes or something. Probably the best thing about Monaco 2 is that (most of) the new classes feel a little overpowered in some cases, except that when you bring them into a game, you still feel like you're having fun with it and you still feel challenged by it. There is a particular issue, a victim of the 3D perspective I think, where usable items are placed too-close together, and only one becomes accessible at all. The prison level has a computer with a vent right next to it, and the computer is completely unusable because pressing E near it (in any position) triggers the windup to enter the vent instead. There's seemingly unavoidable situations like this all over the game anytime the pickaxe is used to create a new interactable. Overall, the game could use some fine-tuning but I'm still regularly itching to play Monaco 2 just as much as I ever did with Monaco 1.

I wish I could speak to the actual experience of playing this game, but I can't. The game doesn't support customizable keybinds, so I'm unable to play the game in comfortable hand positions (I'm left-handed, so using my right hand to play with WASD is awkward). I suppose I could play with my left on WASD and right on the mouse like most people, but why should I? Practically every other game released today has customizable keybinds. Monaco 1 had them back in 2015. Half Life is from 2000-whatever and it has them. Even some flash games support changing keys. It's a basic accessibility feature that the developers have overlooked, and I have no obligation to change how I play games to indulge a developer's negligence. I almost feel bad, because this feels like such a stupid reason to leave a negative review, but it's also such a stupid, basic feature to not have implemented in a game at release. I would have refunded this if I could, but I held onto it for too long in hopes that a patch or update would add the feature. I've asked on forums and troubleshooting pages, but I've never received an acknowledgement of the issue. So, if you are left-handed or just have a preferred set of keybinds, don't bother. I don't know if this applies to AZERTY keyboards, but if you do take that risk, keep your finger on the refund request. Don't end up like me.

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?

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.