Just as a fair warning, these are simply early impressions of Monaco: What’s Yours is Mine, the new indie top-down heist game from Pocketwatch Games. I haven’t finished the game solo, and I haven’t played any of it in multiplayer. I have, however, watched a fair amount of the game played in multiplayer and feel I can at least speak to what it does, if not offer my own opinions on how well it does it.

Now that that’s out of the way, I’ll get to talking at length why Monaco is not a very smartly designed singleplayer game, since it’s just the multiplayer mode without the thing that makes multiplayer what it is: the other people.

Monaco: What’s Yours is Mine operates on a class system inspired by the varied casts of characters in the heist films it takes influence from. You’ve got the Lookout, the Lockpick, the Pickpocket, the Hacker, the Cleaner, and a few more, all of whom are distinctly designed and have certain specializations. These include (in order) seeing guards from greater distances, more quickly opening locked doors and safes, collecting coins in the leave more easily, hacking computers more efficiently, and being able to knock out unsuspecting guards.

In multiplayer, this works because there can only be four people in the game, meaning they all have to choose a specialization and stick with it in the game, meaning that collaborating and being an effective and skilled team is the key to success. Any class that is left out means that the team has a distinct disadvantage when it comes to clearing all of the coins in a level, evading guards, and accomplishing mission objectives.

The thing is, in singleplayer, you can still only play as one class in a level. Unless, of course, you die, in which case the character you are playing as is dead for that mission, and you have three more chances with the other classes to get things right. There’s no AI assistance and you can’t swap characters mid-mission without dying and losing access to a specific character.

When you die in multiplayer, other members of your crew are practically forced to come and revive you (they can’t move on to different areas unless the whole crew is at the door). In single-player, dying is losing the bonus granted by a certain character with no chance to get it back (at least, without restarting the mission entirely, which makes failure pretty much moot).

This wouldn’t be a huge problem if Monaco’s 30 or so levels were designed or laid-out differently between singleplayer and multiplayer. The levels are pretty clearly built with cooperative play in mind, allowing many opportunities for players to create distractions while their friends sneak past some guards. Solo, though, the number of guards and lasers and scent-following dogs and all very quickly becomes too punishing to be fun.

Getting spotted by guards is fun, chaotic, and, weirdly enough, potentially useful in multiplayer since during the time that you or another player is being chased, other players can use that time to actually do things. In singleplayer, it’s a total nuisance and nothing gets accomplished. It makes Monaco feel like a pure stealth game rather than a heist game, and I’m positive that that was not the intention.

Monaco’s singleplayer doesn’t have room to meaningfully or entertainingly use the class system so integral to its multiplayer. Having a single, central character available for play, one that had a number of benefits (or perhaps just a “jack of all trades, master of few” type), in a narrative where the group of cons relied on you to do the dirty work of their heists, would’ve made for a more engrossing, less frustrating singleplayer experience.

The fact that nothing was changed from multiplayer to singleplayer sort of demonstrates the lack of care paid to the solo side of things. Hell, trying to start a level alone will still bring you to a screen that allows for different character class inputs, and promptly to a MP lobby with only one spot filled.

Maybe the best way around this would’ve been to make the game multiplayer-only. I most likely wouldn’t have bought it if that were the case, since no one I know is really into these types of games and the only way I’d get them to play it with me would be to pay for several copies. Still, me not playing it would be a preferable situation to me buying it and not liking it, right?

I’m not trying to say with all of this that Monaco: What’s Yours is Mine is a bad game by any stretch of the imagination, because to be honest, I don’t know if it is, or even if I really dislike it. If I had played any multiplayer at all, I could offer a stronger opinion on the game as a whole. Alas, all that I can say is that it’s unfortunate that Monaco’s solo side wasn’t given the same amount of thought and craft as its counterpart.