Snatch

Boy howdy, do I love me some stealth games.  You remember back when you were like 7 years old, you would hide in various corners and crevices of your house while mommy was making breakfast.  You'd see how close you could get without her noticing and, if you were feeling particularly mischievous, you'd jump out and see how high you could make her jump.  Maybe that was just me, but stealth games capture that same kind of gleeful tension.

Snatch, in this context, is not the minigame in Saint's Row, which is about as far from a stealth game as you can get, but rather a top-down stealth 'em up wherein you play as a dude in a beret who wants to steal some stuff from a highly secure facility.  That's about all there is in terms of context.  I kept dying before I could learn any more.

As much as I fear doing this may make this review seem more like a haiku in terms of length, I'm going to start out with the one most glaring flaw, which is pretty much my only talking point.  There are not enough checkpoints in this game. Not nearly.

Now, it's not secret that I am a huge fan of Deus Ex, and while that game wasn't exclusively a stealth game, if you chose to play it like one, it was some of the best stealthing you've ever done in a game.  There are a lot of reasons why the stealth worked so well in Deus Ex.  The AI was programmed to perfection (not all too realistically, but who cares), the enemies were laid out perfectly in perfectly designed levels and the whole thing was...well...perfect.  Thing is, Snatch has all that.  The levels are designed in such a way that everything is conveyed to you exactly when it needs to be conveyed.  And you're the one who figures it out.  The game doesn't just flash some text in front of you and hope you get it.  Seriously, this is a fantastic example of level design that compliments the player's learning of the mechanics.

But what's the one thing Deus Ex had that Snatch doesn't?  Save scumming.  In Deus Ex, you could have a (pretty much) unlimited amount of save states wherever you wanted.  In a stealth game especially, nothing can ruin the flow like long iteration time, so the designer of a stealth game must take every precaution to make sure that the player feels punishment for their mistakes, but can get right back into the game and try again with minimal frustration. That's where Snatch fails.  I know how much the DigiPen devs hate the idea of saving a game, but in this game, there really needed to be some way to avoid restarting the entire level every time you die.

All-in-all, though, I still give this game a thumbs up.  I'm holding back my ever-coveted seal of arbitrary approval for stumbling upon the aspect that makes good stealth games great, but I still say it's worth checking out.  That's all I got for now.  Until next time, stay quiet.

Links
Gimme yo stuff: https://www.digipen.edu/?id=1170&proj=486