The Swindle Review

If there’s a genre I love more than Role-Playing Games and First-Person Shooters, it’s Stealth. Preferably first-person but I’m not picky. Sneak in undetected, take opponents out without alerting others, make off with something critical under cover of darkness, awesome stuff. Trouble is, stealth is slow, and with so many games crying for attention I can’t divert as much time to them as I should. Enter The Swindle from Time Gentlemen Please developer Size Five Games: it’s Thief combined with Super Meat Boy, and it’s super quick and really fun. Let me explain.

Everything is kept really simple. The Swindle is a Victorian Steampunk game where you play as a thief, or rather a manager of thieves, where steam-powered robots have replaced police and any thief sighting by robot or robotic camera will send an alert to the central force which will raid a level. In 100 days a Skynet-style system will go active which will make all criminal enterprises impossible. It’s up to you to build up your thieves, pull heists, and finally gain access to the ultimate Swindle, but that clock’s ticking and every failure will cost you time you don’t have.

The Slums in Moonlight, C Minor

This is the extent of the story, and indeed the extent of things told to you. If you buy an upgrade like Bombs or have an important new feature like enemies that can detect audio there’s a brief tutorial pop-up as you enter a level/heist, but otherwise Size Five Games leaves things utterly up to the player. The only way to find out what something does or how to do anything is to find out the hard way - by facing it head on. In this way The Swindle is a little unfair, but it’s the fun kind of unfair that forces the player to be cautious around new things. There is absolutely no hand-holding here, and while they tell you the basic controls actually getting used to them is your responsibility.

The level setup goes thus: start on your airship, choose a destination (you’ll start with only the low-paying Slums), and your current thief will launch to that area. Playing in 2D, you need to sneak your agile thief through that area, avoiding or destroying the various forms of robot guards/cameras, and finding and hacking computers to get cash. Detection means either death or, after an undetermined amount of time, the police force arriving in force. Death means you lose your current thief, all your accumulated cash from that heist, and a day, so you’ll have to try again with a new thief. Success means returning to your airship via the pod you arrived in, whereupon you can spend your ill-gotten gains on upgrades or a ticket to a more well-off area.

Hang in there, baby

This is how the entire game goes basically, with things getting progressively more brutal the more heists your gang pulls off. While there are only six “levels” each one changes in a variety of ways that keeps things feeling fresh each time… oh yes, and the levels are randomly generated too. This generally works extremely well - granted you’ll occasionally get a mine up a short step or a tiny room with a single bundle of cash buried deep within the building, but you’re never expected to get 100% cash and stuff like the mine situation becomes a test of the unexpected. I’d personally either go around or place a bomb underneath it for example. Even seemingly unfair level design or enemy placement feels like a challenge or a test of your ingenuity, and that’s what divides “good randomly-generated games” and “bad randomly-generated games”. The Swindle is definitely good, and I can imagine replaying it for a long time.

But it must be said that it can be extremely frustrating, too. Half the times I quit The Swindle it wasn’t because I’d unlocked some milestone or felt I’d had enough for the evening, it was because I was ready to throw at least part of my PC out the window. Losing because some random robot insta-killed my thief, or I pressed ‘Left’ instead of ‘Right’ on the hacking minigame over a mine, or most likely jumped off a wall and shot forwards into danger rather than the little hop I’d intended… well, that’s really, really annoying.

In short, the one big failing of The Swindle is the controls. They don’t make the game unplayable or anything (War of the Worlds and Deadlight come to mind), but they’re not as precise as they need to be. Thieves fall down walls too fast and spring off them uncontrollably. If I saw a robot guard patrolling a narrow area behind a window and I wanted to leap off the wall, smash the window and take it out, I probably wouldn’t be able to. There’s no pinpoint precision platforming here, and I still don’t know why I could scrabble up and cling to some vertical walls and not others. I stayed well away from spike traps and anything involving clear, perfect jumping, let me tell you. It’s not a deal-breaker as most of the time I felt in control, but if I died I rarely felt like it was my fault.

No chance.

Making up for a lot of problems though are the aesthetics: graphics, music and sound design. Graphically The Swindle has a very simple blocky style but it’s lovely to look at with plenty of detail in every area, and each robot has a distinct, recognisable appearance to help the player easily identify them. Excellent. The soundtrack by newcomer composer Tobey Evans is hugely catchy and just makes me want to keep playing. Even the sound design deserves praise, with some lovely scrabbling-up-wall noises, satisfying THWACKS to a robot bonce, and every surface makes a unique and correct sound effect. It impressed me enough to notice it, and I hope that says it all.