Safeguarding Your Life Of Crime In The Swindle

The Swindle is not a game that suffers fools. You can get away with some of the most audacious burglaries, besting the automatons and traps that guard fortunes with an array of gadgets and tools in the process, but if you put just a single step wrong, your thief is done for. Forever.

Luckily, with crime about to be wiped out for good, another thief will gladly step out of the escape pod and attempt to burgle whatever building lies in front of them to further your collective goal: the destruction of the Devil’s Basilisk. In this steampunk version of 1869 London, Scotland Yard are set to bring the Basilisk online in just 100 days, and so it’s a race against time to steal as much money from the city as possible and buy access to the airspace over the city, before launching an extraordinary raid on the police station in which the Basilisk is being held. The clock is ticking.

Except it’s not really. The subdued background music prominently features the sounds of clocks as you land and start to break into the target building, but there’s no time limit on how long you can spend in a particular level – though later in the game, hacker bots will start to siphon cash from your reserves. All you’re left with is the self-imposed pressure to do well, to find the steam-powered computers and rinse them for all their worth.

It’s all too easy to bite of just a little bit more than you can chew, when you should be cutting your losses and heading back to the escape pod in which you landed. It’s just that the convoluted and labyrinthine buildings and the patrolling robot guards thrown up by the procedural generation systems always feel like they’re holding more secrets and more opportunities to grab some cash. Those secrets usually end up getting you killed or trapped.

Your thieves will die a lot on this quest – though there is an achievement for completing the game with just a single thief, which boggles my mind. A big part of that comes from how few abilities you start off with, as you lack even the ability to hack a computer terminal and are reduced to grabbing bundles of cash which are conveniently left on the floor. All you need is £100, but even that can prove challenging if you don’t quit while you’re ahead.

Once you gain the hacking ability, those terminals offer you a much better source of funds, with those in the slums netting you hundreds and later areas spitting out tens of thousands at a time. It’s with this money that you buy more abilities, from a steam powered double jump and bomb, both of which quickly open up more avenues to getting through the buildings and back out again, to EMPs, remote detonators and computer-sapping bugs which drain cash even after you’ve left a level. Needless to say, you start to feel incredibly powerful once you’ve unlocked all these powers.

However, as you buy your way out from the Slums to the Warehouse District, New Belgravia and onwards, the security measures become more extreme and more outlandish. Electrical traps, impenetrable shutters, flying drones, robots that listen for noise and shift to a higher alert – the list goes on and on, and they appear in ever-changing combinations. You’ll have to have your wits about you, sure, but it always helps to have a little bit of luck, whereby the level generates a computer terminal right near your starting point. But again, more often than not, my valiant thief would go off to meet his maker.

And yet, while I’m often left kicking myself for some seemingly insignificant little mistake which ended up getting me spotted or had me killing myself, there are more than enough moments where I was seemingly unstoppable. Timing my jumps would be impeccable, I’d make ingenious use of the gadgets available to me and each bop to the back of a robot’s head would land sweetly. Similarly, there’d be those times where I’d be spotted and as the beat kicks in behind the music and the tension ramps up with the impending arrival of the police robots, I’d manage to speed to a computer, grab some cash and still make my escape. It helps, of course, that The Swindle likes to make you feel good about every little success, with liberal application of slow motion when you take down multiple guards, blow things up and smash through glass.

So no, The Swindle might not forgive your mistakes or always present you with a manageable task to start off with, but it will keep you coming back just for that moment where it all comes together and you manage to make that big score.