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Have You Played... The Swindle?

Don't be heisty

Robots! Sneaking! Hacking! Dying! So. Much. Dying. The Swindle is a roguelike sneak 'em up that gets far too repetitive far too quickly, but I do like how most of those deaths are preceded by greed.

The year is 1849. The place is a semi-cyberfied London, where steampunk meets .exe files. You've got one hundred days to prepare for the most important heist of all time. Go!

It's a great premise, let down by early missions that lack variety. Death comes quickly, and death means another hour or more of pilfering through the same poorly-guarded, poorly-stocked houses. Their layouts are randomised, but not in a way that matters.

It's a shame that failure is boring, because the decisions leading up to it are the opposite. You're free to leave each level when you like, to simply walk away from situations that look too tough to manage. You don't, of course. You fool yourself into chasing after that last safe, which turns out to be anything but.

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Matt Cox avatar
Matt Cox: Once the leader of Rock Paper Shotgun's Youth Contingent, Matt is an expert in multiplayer games, deckbuilders and battle royales. He occasionally pops back into the Treehouse to write some news for us from time to time, but he mostly spends his days teaching small children how to speak different languages in warmer climates.
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The Swindle

PS4, Xbox One, PS3, PlayStation Vita, Nintendo Wii U, PC

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