The game – a first-person affair - begins with your character locked up in prison and being bailed out to quite a princely sum by a mysterious cabal of insalubrious individuals that intend to make you steal and earn your way through your debt.
Beginning in an abandoned warehouse, you only have a PC, a box to send over your stolen goods, and a wall chart to pan out your next nick-fest. There is only one neighbourhood available at the start, with you and your team – up to four players online – needing to rack up some earnings (via a percentage cut from what you steal, which gets higher dependent on the difficulty) in order to unlock heists and other areas to pillage.
The control scheme is simple enough to get a hold of, and if you’ve ever picked a lock in Fallout, then the mini games here will be very familiar to you. We had a great few hours (I played with my fellow GF comrade Transvaal) scoping out homes and storage spaces, one keeping an eye out from outside as the other breaks in and pilfers the goodies.
These early hours of gameplay led to a lot of fun and tense situations, the police are fast to react should you get caught, and this leads to you both pegging it away from the boys in blue in a blaze of sirens and hiding in bushes – the PS5 controller flashes red and blue in these instances, which is a great touch, especially when playing in the dark! – and many amusing moments such as:
There are a few quirky moments that are obvious from the start, but the real issues soon creep in. There’s little randomisation, so you end up going into the same buildings and stealing the same items over and over – as the game is quite a grind to move forwards and unlock other areas, and the houses are sometimes not actually designed as real houses are, with people sleeping in beds right next to the front door etc. and the biggest problem for me – beyond the janky controls when trying to jump on things and clamber over walls, which was a constant irk – was the fact that no one in the game acts – or has the sleeping patterns of an actual human being.
The game is set entirely at night and early mornings during your burglaries, but people are wandering the streets, folks in their homes are gardening and wandering around inside and outside all night, or constantly pacing in looped patterns around their houses, sleeping only for a minute or so before getting up, watching TV, and wandering around again – it makes the entire game seem unrealistic and a bit thrown together when it comes to NPCs, which are a huge, foundational aspect of it.
“Right… I’ve got the front door open…where is the owner of the house?”
“She’s in bed…NO! She’s getting up, I think she’s heard you! Hide, HIDE!”
“There’s nowhere to go, I’m stuck in the corner of the living room and the window is locked!”
“no, no…oh…hang on…she’s in the bathroom…she’s having a quack…she looks like she’ll be a while”
And it’s always funny to wonder where your fellow burglar is, only to see them running out of someone’s house clutching a massive, boxed telly, as you chuckle and go back to rummaging through the drawers in the house you are currently burglarising, picking up phones and petty cash as you go.
There are a few quirky moments that are obvious from the start, but the real issues soon creep in. There’s little randomisation, so you end up going into the same buildings and stealing the same items over and over – as the game is quite a grind to move forwards and unlock other areas, and the houses are sometimes not actually designed as real houses are, with people sleeping in beds right next to the front door etc. and the biggest problem for me – beyond the janky controls when trying to jump on things and clamber over walls, which was a constant irk – was the fact that no one in the game acts – or has the sleeping patterns of an actual human being.
The game is set entirely at night and early mornings during your burglaries, but people are wandering the streets, folks in their homes are gardening and wandering around inside and outside all night, or constantly pacing in looped patterns around their houses, sleeping only for a minute or so before getting up, watching TV, and wandering around again – it makes the entire game seem unrealistic and a bit thrown together when it comes to NPCs, which are a huge, foundational aspect of it.
I can understand the guard by the storage facility having to do rounds, but when everyone is up and about, it removes the tension and cause / effect that should exist with a more tedious sense of tension whereby you end up crouching in a corner and sighing at the preposterousness of it all.
The difficulty settings are also really unbalanced, on easy it’s more feasible with one or two of you, but in normal and hard, everyone reacts to anything and it’s a very repetitive game of hiding and running away instead of being able to plan anything.
Audio in the game is all over the shop as well, as the spacial awareness is non-existent, with footsteps just sounding ‘close’ so you don’t know if they are wandering around on the same floor as you, upstairs, downstairs, or in a separate area of the house where they are no threat, and we were playing through pretty tasty headphones, so it’s definitely an issue.
SUMMARY
Crime Simulator is so, so close to being a unique game with a great premise that can result in genuine hilarity, but all too quickly devolves into repetition and frustration at the design.
Crime Simulator is so, so close to being a unique game with a great premise that can result in genuine hilarity, but all too quickly devolves into repetition and frustration at the design.
If CookieDev can solve these concerns in their next release, I would certainly be recommending it as a great title to play with friends, but as it stands, it’s merely a few hours of fun before the issues take over.
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