Review: The Masterplan - Enemy Slime

Review: The Masterplan

Curse you Richard Nixonnnnn!

PC

It’s the 70’s and America is in the midst of a recession. Johnny Green is laid off from his job, and with no options he turns to the only means of supporting himself left: he starts to deal drugs. However, President Nixon, realizing the drug epidemic now gripping the streets of America, declares the now infamous war on drugs. Johnny is, of course, a target and the cops eventually catch up with him. He surrenders but the cops shoot him anyway and rip him off. When he wakes up he is in jail with nothing but a cake from his brother and his wits to escape from captivity. So starts your journey into looking for revenge against the system that he feels has failed him, taking the extent of his revenge to Nixon himself. You will start from the bottom, robbing small targets like mini-marts and kiosks and eventually you’ll end robbing Fort Knox itself. Unfortunately getting there will take some time and effort, because The Masterplan gets amazingly repetitive.

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The Masterplan is a top down strategic heist game. You are in charge of a team and must find a way to extract as much value from every heist you can by coordinating your team appropriately. To make this possible the game allows you to stop the time at any time so that you can issue orders to every one of your goons. Initially you will only be in charge of the Green brothers but as your war chest grows, you will be able to hire goons. You only need to hire them once, and they will stay with you unless they die during one of the levels. As you play the levels you are able to find intel for new jobs, which opens new levels, and new contacts, which opens more gear, usually weapons. The controls are mapped to the mouse, you click on the character that you want to control with the left mouse button to see what they have in their inventory, and to give them orders to interact with the environment.

The initial impressions are good. You can see all of the level, and plan ahead. There are several ways to approach most missions. You can try to go in and shoot up the place, beat people into unconsciousness, try to sneak past people, or start an all out brawl. As you do more missions and get more goons and equipment, more avenues open up to you. There are some clever mechanics to the heists. There are several kinds of doors, which can be opened with different keys. When you are in a heist, equipping your pistols will make most characters in the map put their hands up. You can then make them move, open doors, punch windows, and empty their pockets. The designers buck some of the tropes by having more than one key for each type of door exist in the levels. This means that even if you close a door behind you, or if you lock a lot people in the same room someone may have a key to open it. It is important to make sure you check your victim’s pockets. NPC’s won’t remain docile, if you turn your back on them they will attack, and they will also get fed up and attack if you point your guns at them and do nothing for a while. They turn on you surprisingly fast. In a couple of seconds they will charge you, tempting you to calm them down by filling them with lead. This is bad, because killing people means you will have to hire a cleaning service that will claim part of your earnings and eat into your profits.

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If all of this sounds interesting, then I hope you have the patience to do the same heists over and over. The Masterplan has several levels, but ultimately not enough of them, and in order to afford hiring goons, buying equipment, and paying the cleaning fees that you will surely be assessed as more civilians decide to be heroes when you turn your back on them for a few seconds means that before you are ready to tackle more advanced heists you must complete earlier heists several times. The designers did put some alternate routes for the game that can be unlocked by having more advanced gear and more goons. But like most of the game itself there are only so many times you can do the same thing before it gets old. There are some heists that are more immediately profitable than others, while more advanced heists have documents that open up more levels and equipment. I ended up going to new levels, grabbing as many documents as I could, then  leaving without stealing anything. Then I would go to the other heists and grind until I had enough cash to buy what I needed to take on the more advanced heists. The grind of the game is pretty brutal and it really kills a lot its appeal for me. While the developer did attempt to make sure there are different ways to complete each of them, they are simply not enough. It makes the game boring quickly.

This repetition does not necessarily hamper a game if the gameplay can support it. After all, great heist games like Payday are built on the same premise. The Masterplan’s main problem is that the way the gameplay is built is filled with frustration. Despite the promises made by its name, there isn’t much planning to be done. The intelligence you gather opens up the levels and gives you two or three tips of varying usefulness, but not much more. There is no real planning until you are already in the game level and so you end up having to improvise. As you play the level several times, you memorize where things are and you plan ahead. But it feels like a game of memorization rather than preparation.

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But I don’t just have to nitpick how the game’s title relates to its gameplay, its problems do run deeper than that. Characters and their movement speed make the game a chore to play. Characters move slowly, and if you give different goons different orders, it is easy for them to become side tracked. It is not rare to find someone going off on a completely different path than what was initially prescribed for them. This can be a huge problem, as they can run into guards, which means getting into fights. They can also get the attentions of cameras which will attract the police. This will result in  shootouts, which results in dead goons and cleaning fees. Both of these thing eat into your profits.

This does occasionally result in some organically tense and fun scenarios. For example, during a heist I was was deep into the level. As I reached the objective, one of my goons decided to acquire self determination and walked in front of a camera and tripped the alarm. Thirty seconds until the police would arrive. Panicked, I picked up as much loot as I could and stared walking towards the entrance so that I could avoid the fire fight. It was then I realized one of the guards I’d locked in a room had a key and they were all free. People died. Then the cops showed up, and it became a frantic shoot out to reach my getaway car and escape with everyone alive. Unfortunately, experiences like this were rare. You will have to wade through a lot of monotony and frustration to get to that point.

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The Masterplan could have been a better game with a little less frustration, and few more levels and variety. It is disheartening to find that most of the tools you will unlock are guns and bombs. It makes the game shallower than what it could have been. While the planning stage is not necessary, it would have been nice to make it feel more strategic. Still with a little bit more polish, especially in how the goons behave and interact with the civilians, this could be a much better experience. If you don’t mind the repetition and frustration and want a heist game that has at least some focus on strategy, go ahead and pick it up, but I would recommend waiting until this one is one sale.

This review was done on retail release code provided by the publisher.