One Last Job
HIGH A well-executed card system and great voice acting.
LOW Any of the hacking sequences.
WTF Why can’t I interact with the bionic dog more?
TRANSCRIPT: Venice is a town full of life, vigor, and… terrible memories for Alex.
After a heist goes very wrong, she does her best to lay low and disappear, but her client doesn’t settle for that. They give her an ultimatum — she’s now got one month to get her hands on a prototype she failed to steal, and if she fails again, mercenaries will be sent in to kill her. Not seeing any other options, Alex gathers a team to pull off this one final job, after which she’s getting out of the business for good.
HeistGeist is a story-focused RPG where players control Alex and her team of thieves and hackers who must to try and steal the prototype. Players will go through daring heists, hack through corporate security grids and safehouses, and fight off both cops and private security standing in their way, all while gathering information on a secret war between corporations of the world.
The main mechanic in HeistGeist is a deck of cards for each character. Combat cards deal damage to the enemy, restore health, or give buffs to prevent incoming damage. Each card also has either the letter A, B, or C associated with it. Playing cards in alphabetical order will combo and grant extra effects.
For example, a healing card with the letter A heals three health, but if the player uses the “C” card before it, it heals three health and removes status effects. Combos like these turn into the backbone of the strategy needed to survive encounters and heists. Having obvious combo mechanics does eliminate the thrill of discovering combos through play itself, but it does allow for experimentation, and I enjoyed being able to tweak my deck every time I got a new card.
Another aspect of HeistGeist‘s gameplay is hacking — it’s puzzle-like and requires players to do a specific amount of damage instead of just doing damage in general.
In each hack, players will start from a home node and have to navigate through security nodes to get to a lock and break into it. Some nodes act like walls so players just need to break through and move on, but other nodes require an exact amount of damage to successfully pass. If players do too much damage, the path closes and players will have find another way to move on, otherwise they restart the entire hack. There’s some flair in having hacking work this way in a card-based title, but it’s not as interesting as the combat.
Also, while these systems are great idea, it feels like they both need a bit of tuning. For example, many cards in HeistGeist feel unbalanced because they could feasibly work in any deck, which ends up stripping away the strategy of careful deckbuilding. For example, there were times where I specifically played cards that did not follow an alphabetized combo order and won with barely a scratch.
My other gripe is that hacking doesn’t use the combo mechanics mentioned above, so it slows down the momentum of play every time a hack was needed for a heist. There are fewer options for hacking cards, more limited card interaction, and less forgiveness if players make a mistake. I spent a lot of extra time proceeding carefully in hacks because I didn’t want to be forced to start over if I played just one card wrong.
Despite those rough edges, HeistGeist won points with me for realistic characters, solid voice acting, and a script that kept me interested in what was happening. The intrigue behind the corporation war was a welcome twist (no spoilers!) and one of my favorite scenes was when I needed to find information while also running an art heist — the person I was stealing from confronted me before I escaped, and I was shocked to find that they applauded me for swiping it and let me keep it. It was a fascinating character moment I wasn’t expecting, and the script has several others like it in store. Unfortunately, HeistGeist‘s ending doesn’t quite land where I would have liked it to, but it wasn’t enough to sour the experience.
Overall, HeistGeist is an engaging romp through cyberpunk Central Europe. I wish it did a bit more with its card mechanics and strategies, but it’s interesting enough to see through to the end. It doesn’t quite live up to the potential of its concepts, but it remains a recommendation nonetheless.
For me, HeistGeist gets 7 bad AI jokes out of 10.
Disclosures: This game is developed and published by Doublequote Studios. It is currently available on PC. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the PC. Approximately 12 hours of play were spent playing the game, and the game was completed. There are no multiplayer modes.
Parents: This game is unrated by the ESRB. In it, players will use cards to attack enemies with guns, blades, and other weapons. Characters will flash red as they are damaged, but there is no blood or gore. There are some swears throughout the conversations.
Colorblind Modes: Colorblind Modes are not present.
Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: This game offers subtitles, but subtitles can not be altered and/or resized. Audio is not needed to complete the game. The game is fully accessible.
Controls: Controls are not remappable, and there is no control diagram. Players use the mouse to select and play cards, advance dialogue, move to new places in heists and the world map — everything.
While Sonic and Street Fighter were great places to start, his first love was Final Fantasy X when his dad bought a PS2. Ever since, that love for gaming has evolved -- there are a number of game worlds out there, and he intends to explore them all. RPG to horror, platformers to casual and everything in between -- if it’s available, he’ll play it.
While his time is short between writing reviews, tabletop gaming, and attempting to start a cheesecake business, he has caught all 806 pokemon and can speedrun Star Fox 64 in less than 40 minutes. He’s always looking for new things to try and new challenges to conquer. You can find him on Twitter -- @eugene_sax.
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