Killers and Thieves

The game has interesting inventory and NPC management, and a gorgeous art style, but doing the actual heists plays very miserably and is what makes me hesitant to play this often. I'd only recommend someone to play this game only for ideas to develop their own fantasy thieves guild management game.

Fun game and love the idea of it. Would be cool if there was a bit more of a tutorial and some on the Menus where streamlined a little.

A good game, but underbaked - needs more variety, better pathfinding & some polishing. It's a timer-based side-scrolling thieving strategy (alike 'action phase' in 'This War of Mine' with random level generation a bit resembling 'King Ludwig' tabletop game), also with thieves roster and a bit of trading, which sounds super cool to me, but overall clunkiness (UI lacks flow) and the 'samey' feel of it seriously undermine the potential here.

I finally finished this game today. It's a great little gem, nice little twist in the end. It requires a certain maturity with regards to realizing the strategies that you can or should do.

When I got this game, I HATED IT. It was difficult and everyone kept ending up in prison. Fast forward a couple of years later, I decided to try it again. I started a new game and stuck with it over the course of the week.

It doesn't really matter what skills your thieves have. What matters is what your current group of four (at most) have and how you make it work.

Killers and Thieves is a bad game, its not so much that its broken (although there are bugs) or even poorly designed, so much as it is lacking, for a finished game so much is missing that it makes it impossible to recommend this game.

So lets talk about whats here and so you get an idea of whats missing. The game is divided into two parts managing the thieves guild and heists. Lets start with guild management as theres not much here despite it being one of the two major elements of the game. You'll hire and train thieves to work for the guild, they in turn will steal things and you'll fence them for the gold to pay the bills. And what are those bills? well you pay a weekly fee to your thieves and fences and thats it. The guild is so lacking I was convinced I'd missed something but thats all there is and as a result your gold will build up leaving the main feature of heists (stealing gold) feeling pointless.

Then add on top of that the fact that fencing goods is a pain, you'll have certain shops that will sell your goods, but they have types of goods they will sell (general goods, clothes, liquor) if you sell the wrong goods it takes longer to sell and fetch lower prices, on top some districts have bonuses and penalties to certain types of goods. Stores also have limited space for fenced items so you can only sell maybe 4 at a time, so having the right type of stores is important if only to sell things quickly and clear the backlog on stolen goods. But theres the problem that most stores are random for each player (there are some fixed stores everyone will get) so you could be missing a store type until you advance the story to get that fixed store or the only art store in your game might be in a district with a penalty to art, I never found a weapons or jewelry
store for example (all stores are hidden and you have to find them). But thats not even the worst of it, when you sell goods you don't go to a sales screen and select a store to sell goods oh no, you go to the world map then to the district map, then to the store menu then sell items to that ONE store then back out to the world map to the next district map to the next store menu EVERY SINGLE TIME. And with that limited inventory space you'll have to do this multiple times for every store just to offload the gear from a single large heist.

So then maybe the second half of the game will make up for it? Not really, you'll start off your heists on the district maps, these start off blank and you'll deploy thieves on stakeouts to find anything of value, this will reveal any stores as well as the general value of items in the areas you can heist. This by the way is the only real non heist option for your thieves but it doesn't even show you the radius of the stakeouts effect, so its easy for you to miss things (stores and taverns) hidden on the map without realizing it. There are also guard icons on the map and they add extra guards to any area with that icons radius, but again you can't tell what that radius is, so deciding to rob this building is hard because are those guards in range or not? no way to tell.

And now into the heist itself, you'll load in on the street with a range of buildings, each building has one entrance and is made up of random collection of rooms, this is true of all districts with just the size of the buildings being different. You'll have to go into the building a steal their loot and there are locks, guards and civilians to get in the way. And thats it, thats all there is, after a single mission you've seen all the game has to throw at you and all thats left is to throw more of it at you as the game progresses.

So how about the tools you have to get around these challenges. well theres stealth, you have a number based on the thieves stats, this is a counter and when you are seen by someone it goes down, once it hits zero everyone in the district will know what you're up to and attack you on sight, you can hide but that just makes the counter go down slower and given the random guard patrols, you can end up with a guards just standing there watch you for 10 minutes and once that counters gone you lose the ability to hide and it never recovers. Given that guards will just hang out in narrow passages and watch you how can you get around them? well theres not alot you can do, its here that the big holes show the most theres so much you'd expect from a stealth games toolbox that just isn't here, you can't throw rocks or distract guard, you can't stealth past them, you can't lure them out, you CAN fight them but this lowers your stealth to zero instantly and fights are random dice rolls, you don't know how well your guys gonna do, and they can't escape from a fight, they either win, die or go to jail thats it. Thats a problem as when the games advanced to the point where you're watching six guards move about the single entrance that buildings have, especially when none of your limited skills help (climb lets you climb the outsides of buildings but you have to be inside the house to start with, acrobatics can let you leap from building to building again from inside and only for building close enough together, something you won't know until you're in the level).

I could go on, I haven't even touched on the bugs, but if the above screed isn't enough warning for you, nothing will be.

I don't normally give bad reviews anywhere but... this game is a buggy mess that was abandoned by the devs, who have no intention of ever returning to fix things up.

There are multiple game-breaking bugs that required I start a new game. There are bugs that prevent your characters from moving - they just come to a stand still and you lose control of them. Training thieves sometimes makes them lose a LOT of points in a stat for no discernable reason. There's really a lot of bugs that just flat out interfere with gameplay and force you to restart a new game or restart a level.

The art is very well-done and the animations are great. My only problem with the art is, the heists all look the same wherever you go. The heists in poorest section of the city look identical and indistinguishable from the wealthiest section of the city, differing only in height and width of the buildings. The game background never changes, the music is the same all the way through the game which lead me to play spotify in the background instead.

The plot was great at the onset of the game, but toward the end it was apparent that the devs had rushed the ending to get the product out. The ending made absolutely no sense, has no closure, left so many loose ends and left more questions than when I had started the game in the first place.

I really, really wanted this game to be good - I love stealth games and thief games, I love having a character that runs around and steals things. I'm just deeply disappointed this game was so buggy, rushed, and unfinished. I'm hoping against hope that if the devs don't revisit this title, perhaps the fandom can tinker with it. Who knows?

Alex Thomas, the developer, apparently believes that he can release a half-finished game, and move on to other projects without consequense. It's a name that should be earmarked and noted when considdering future game purchases.

This game was fun while it was being worked on by the devs. I bought it when it was released because it seemed like a cool concept and the devs were responding to reports of bugs so I wanted to support the project. Imagine my surprise that one day in the discussion page the devs made a statement that the author had "moved on to other projects". No response to my question of if that meant it was completley abandoned and no response to anyone making reports anymore answering my question. I uninstalled and left it be for a long while. I don't normally review as I don't normally have a lot of contructive things to say, but this is an exception as I realized that some people are actually still buying this game almost a year after its abandonment.

This is a warning: Don't buy this game expecting it to work. Can you have fun with it? Maybe, yeah. It wouldn't be the first broken game that some people still love to play. But if you find a game breaking bug at any point in the game that would force you to restart or anything, don't expect anything to be done about it.

Caveat: I've been wanting a game very like this one for many years before it was released, so it's possible my glasses are slightly rose-tinted.

So first: I can see why the reviews are mixed. For my first several hours in-game, it was extremely frustrating. I was trying to make it work the way I thought it should work (since there really isn't a great deal of guidance), and...it wasn't working. Beyond problems on the heist, I had no grasp of the shop system for a bit, so my first few attempts were a tale of money problems and dead or imprisoned thieves.

And then something clicked.

And oh man have I been obsessed with this game since. And I'm still within the first 20-25% of the story!

Some pros:

• It's a legitimately thrilling, rewarding experience to make that narrow escape with all the loot. A+ on capturing "the feel of the heist."
  
• If you've ever wanted to have your own adventure in Lankhmar, this is the closest you'll get at the moment. The art and atmosphere make me feel like Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser could pop up any minute.
  
• Suitable price for the content, in my opinion. Great price when you consider how niche the subject is.
  
• That je ne sais quoi certain games (XCOM series and the like) offer whereby the player develops complicated relationships with the in-game crew.
  
• U/I and functionality: it looks pretty, it works, and it hasn't been as buggy for me as some of these reviews would indicate.
  
• Music is pretty perfect.
  

• I've come into contact with one very minor bug so far where a story-quest resolved without me being able to see the result. Pretty minor.
  
• There are certainly some areas of gameplay which could be tweaked or expanded. Sadly, that doesn't look likely to happen. And that's a damn shame.
  
[*] Probably the worst thing is how opaque certain gameplay elements are until trial-and-error teach the player how a skill or mechanic works. (The "climb" skill is still basically a guaranteed death-sentence whenever I try to use it.)

There's so much potential here but this game doesn't reach it. This game was left with several issues that were never addressed before the developer left and never came back. About 4 months ago i made a list of several suggestions for this game, here's my list if you want to know what i think is wrong with the game. http://steamcommunity.com/app/382330/discussions/0/3223871682607861530/

The game was so promising in the beginning. The trailer introduction video, first layout you see when you begin playing the game, and the seemingly challenging first mission.

And then it falls flat. I've begun playing this game not long after this was released on Steam, but instead of fixing things or adding quality-of-life improvements, every single patch ended up breaking functional parts as well as creating new incompatibility issues and introducing never before seen bugs.

If you gloss over all kinds of bugs and technical mismatches in the game (and the surprisingly lacking in-game descriptions and tutorials), you will still run into a brick wall of boredom and unentertaining lack of freedom. The game is advertised as a "rogue" game that supposedly offers lots of different choices. Myself and other players who have logged multiple hours will tell you otherwise.

You will always end up building a single super stealth oriented skill tree after realizing how frustratingly ineffective all other methods are. Sure, you can still pull off successful heists, but good luck in maintaining your sanity and please take good care of your fingernails when you are constantly biting it off while you try to whisk away an unfair RNG that massively penalizes you for your foolish attempt. This is also ignoring how just about every single heist mission is essentially the same overall premise, same overall layout, and same overall obvious traps of the game engine trying to jab you in the throat.

I have waited multiple months until the devs (or pardon, me, a single developer) would pick up the pieces from where it's been decided to abandon the project and fix some of the most simple issues. I believe now is the time for me to give up.

If you look at any reviews for this game, you'll get the impression that it's a neat idea and there might be a great game in there somewhere, but it's not ready yet. That about sums it up. I love Stoic and I'm excited whenever they put something out, but pass on this one for now. If there is an update that fixes some of the control issues, namely
1) the ability to que up actions while paused,
2) the ability to move the camera while paused,
3) the ability to cycle through selected characters easier (maybe binding them to 1,2,3, and 4?),
and/or
4) the ability to at least rebind controls,
then I would pay $20 for this again, maybe more.

When I first got this game I couldn't stop playing it. However, 25+ hours in, it's losing its lustre quickly. Those 25+ hours though were definitely worth it. So let me put it like this:

Pros:
- Stealth puzzle gameplay is fun and addictive.
- Thieve's guild management is something I'm really into.
- Immersive heist missions.
- Solid and challenging learning curve.

Cons:
- Micro-management of money with loading times.
- Repetitive art assets. Probably the biggest reason why it will start to feel repetitive.
- No chance of 0 murder runs. I feel less like a sleek thief and more like a grubby bandit.

Despite these cons though, I still recommend playing it... as well as waiting for some good future patches!

I bought this game despite reading several of the negative reviews and watching some YouTube playthroughs - that should tell you that you have an attractive game story and concept. The characaters are interesting, with just enough lead-ins to leave the player wanting to know more, and the goal of the guild makes this more than just a sidescrolling Thief. These are good things.

You just need to polish the game to address all of the completely valid criticism the game is receiving with regards to gameplay design and bugs. The lack of a forums denies any form of feedback except Steam reviews - which is NOT where you want bugs and gameplay balance issues aired out.

Here are a few additional critiques:

1. Until the bugs and gameplay mechanics are ironed smooth, PERMADEATH is excessively detrimental to basic play testing and you WILL lose what players you attract. Only the most masochistic are going to continue to wade through campaign ending imbalances and bugs. I suggest adding a "Restart Heist" to soften how much the game punishes players due to its current state.

2. Certain skills like Eavesdropping and Climbing are poorly implemented with short durations and excessive cooldowns given the current state of the game. It is unclear if these skills can be boosted by stats. Given how slowly the UI renders, having the Climb skill abruptly deactivate can result in the thief automatically entering a guard-occupied room or a falling death.

3. Climbing Bug / Poor Implementation - a climbing thief cannot manually drop from the 2nd floor to street level, he has to wait for the skill to time out. This can result in poorly executed escapes in a game that heavily punishes combat (it is almost never worth pursuing combat, despite the campaign forcing you to seek it out occassionally).

4. Acrobatics Bug - unable to jump right-to-left, despite UI context icon correctly appearing. Clicking the icon results in thief attempting to walk to the point.

5. Acrobatics Bug - when two or more thieves attempt to jump out of a window (1st-3rd floors) at the same time, the player permenantly loses control of one of the thieves.

The fact that players like myself are taking the time to provide constructive criticism proves the passion and interest your game has stoked in the audience, you just need to polish the turd until it is no longer a turd.

Feels like an early access game. If it had "queued commands" when paused it would clear up many of my complaints. As it sits, I cannot recommend.

As you can see from the store page, the art looks amazing.
I am refunding... but keeping it on my wishlist.
I'm hoping the devs address my main concern (no queued actions while paused).
If this happens, I'll buy it again.

Lovely aesthetic, but undone by the pacing, UI, and execution.

The game is far too hectic to wrestle with the simultaneously chunky and tiny UI, the AI of both the guards and the civilians is extremely basic and arbitrary.

There are no discernable patrol patterns, and once you get into a fight, which you invariably will with the way the guards work, especially earlier in, you're left completely to the mercy of the RNG rather than something sensible like NOT challenging a guard openly and proceeding to get walloped on the head repeatedly while the rest of your crew stands around helplessly. Even if you DID bring along two people that can fight back instead of instantly getting arrested, you can't double team guards, even though they can double team you. Great.

Looks nice, at least.

[edit] Having said this, I like the concept of the game and will happily give this game another shot later down the line once a few things (Say, keybinding, the UI) are worked on. I can live with the sketchy AI and hectic pacing.

Conceptually I really wanted to like this game, "management" games like this are normally kind of my jam especially when they come withs ome kind of interactable portion for deciding outcomes.

But this game is not anywhere close to ready for release.

Bad tutorials, Clunky Control Schemes, Unintivite Game Merchanics. Just so many bad things going on here that take a nice steaming dump on what could have otherwise been a very interesting concept.

Since I've only just gotten it, I'll play further at a later point and edit this review as needed. For now, I will say that I sort of liked my time with Killers and Thieves, and while it has issues(Mainly the lack of tutorial, questionable controls,and civilian/guards being incredibly simple), it is still decent, though very much overpriced for what it does at this point.
Edit: Further playing reveals a much greater problem still- A complete lack of replayability. Once you've seen one or two randomly generated maps, you've seen it all. There doesn't seem to be much more than that, not even story wise.
After a few more hours of trying, it feels very much like a flash game with a great concept and no substance. it's neat and has potential, but it will never realize that potential and become great. Quite sad, but that's how many great concepts go.

My time with it is best summed up by analogy;
You get yourself a new bathtub installed, paid for it and finally want to use it to relax. You step in and the bathtub is too small for you to fit in it, so you awkwardly stand in it trying to take a shower. Then you get a phonecall. The shower was nice, but it only just started and now you're interupted. The phone call was someone trying to order a pizza with the wrong number. You go back to your shower and try to enjoy it when you get called again. someone else trying to order a pizza. This repeats for a few hours and you never get the water to heat up so you have to just take a cold shower and then you turn it off and go do something else. All the while you're left thinking about the wonderful warm bath you've been promised.

Original review follows;
Killers and Thieves puts the player in control of a medieval thieves' guild, an interesting idea that might have needed a bit more explaining and working out. As it stands, it is still worth looking at, but it does feel like it could have used a bit more thought at a lot of points.

The story seems pretty good, but the day to day business of robbing places, training your thieves and selling loot feels like it is lacking a bit and often feels clumsy and obtuse. The controls for your thieves are not very intuitive, and the stealth system not regenerating any points once you've lost them makes it impossible to enter stealth again after being spotted.

But that is just one of the systems that feels too simple to me. Perhaps I just expected too much, but so far I've not yet found any unique looking maps. Everything appears to be randomised, even the story missions I've found thus far. While it seems like a lot of effort was put in the presentation, into looks and mood, into the story itself and the concept, it doesn't seem like this effort was placed on connecting the story to the game. An early example is a story mission telling me to rob a place to put pressure on someone, the map was randomly generated, so I just went in and stole a bunch of stuff. With multiple houses there, I had no idea where I was supposed to go. But it turned out the answer was "Anywhere", as stealing from any of the houses counted. Then in a the story afterward the man's house was robbed, yet I couldn't picture the house as everything seemed to just be randomly generated.

While the graphics are good with a consistent, pleasant to look at style that isn't difficult to tell guards and loot apart from the background, the sound is maybe a bit too simple, with music and soundbites seemingly repeated over and over. This got a bit annoying after a while, which I found to detract from the general experience. They can certainly use more variety for the audio.

Guard AI, for a stealth based game, is fairly important. It is then sad that it is so simplistic. Guards seem to move at random, and stand still at random. This means that if you're unlucky, you're going to be stuck in a room for a long time waiting for the guards to move away. They often patrol in buildings randomly, wandering through bedrooms of slums and standing at random staircases in the middle of a house. There doesn't seem to be any sense, which leads me to believe the guard patrols are probably also randomly generated.

The RPG elements are slow, and you will need to level up a lot in order to get the training points needed to make your thieves capable of doing their job properly, and even then there are often not many ways you can use the skills in the maps as they are, even if you actively look for them. I like the idea of growing my band of thieves from poorly skilled randoms from the street to a group of elite heisters, but the leveling up, learning of skills and trying to make thieves better just doesn't seem to matter most of the time. Not to mention that it takes forever to get even the slightest upgrade.

It feels like they've had a great idea, but didn't really know how to turn it into a great game. So they got a story that seems good so far, and they've made some gameplay for it. But they don't seem to have really made it fit well together with the story, and the gameplay elements often appear to conflict in their goals. The numerous flaws in the game seem to break immersion quite often, and the sheer randomness of everything makes planning impossible. Controlling four thieves at the same time with the clumsy controls means you're likely to just leave three outside and use one at a time.

I like the idea, I like the art, and it seems like a lot of work went into the story. But the gameplay feels lacking in many ways. It is essentially the looting and exploration part of This War of Mine with slight changes to it, randomly generated every time and with an overworld system that doesn't seem to really do much anyway. Many things regarding the gameplay feel like they've not been thought about, leading to what feels like a patchwork of mechanics and systems that interact at times, but never truly work together to provide a great immersive and challenging experience.
It is worth getting and playing at some point, and you may very well end up enjoying it like I do. But I can see that it has big issues that would make it a frustrating and poor experience for many, so definitely do not get it at full price.

I want to love this game. I play blades in the dark table top and this game reminds me of it in all the right ways.

Unfortunately no clear goals or "here's how you could play this game" on what is I'm assumeing is the tutorial story mission killed it.

Trying to rescue my guy from being captured on my second try at the first mission ended with me clicking on the portraits on the left side trying to fight his captor and just calling someone else over to watch their friend go to jail.

Guards magically know you're in houses some how and where you've went. Other guards know what other guards know so there is no running past one before his friend tells him about you. The guards just roll around the houses making a new player put up with that with no clear idea on how to actually play the game, that isn't going to get me to play your game.

However, The art is fantastic, and I like the idea so much that while I am refunding this right now I'm going to keep it on my wishlist so I can watch to see if it gets some updates. But as of right now as other have pointed out the horrible controls alone make this unplayable, couple that with no clear idea on how to play it successfully explained to you in game makes this a big pass on my recommendation to you.

To the developmer, please address these issues I want to play this game.

Edit: after playing a bit more before the refund happened I was able to get past the first mission with out losing some ppl. This however only revealed more problems, even though I did start to feel as though I was getting over the control issues. The next few missions were I guess "assassination" missions. I use quotes because you're not given specific targets to kill you just need to kill x amount of guards and out of the 5 story missions I played 2 used this this as the win condition, and it's freaking weird. Why do I need to just kill random guards?

Another problem was that the story missions give you no idea if it's just going to be a "heist" where you go in and rob stuff, or if you're going to send your 3 or 4 (sometimes specific) thieves to stand on a mission for 3 days just to get a story box. There should be some kind of indicator what you should be ready for so you can coordinate more of your crew to be productive.

The music is horrible and at low levels all you hear is this obnoxious knocking noise to where you'd rather just turn it off.

I also wonder if you can sell enough stuff to maintain your guild very easy. The missions I went on I stole 8 items that all had a very low value but had already spent well over half my coin (at the easiest level I think 800gp out of 1,500gp) getting what little valueables I had amd they were maybe worth 75gp total MAYBE probably closer to 45gp.

I really fear that the 1 and a half hours I've seen of this game is most of what you'd be getting for the entire thing and there is just not enough there to even begin to over look the problems.

Concept is great, art is decent, and the "music" is a short loop of soul grating noise playing over and over.

The game seems to be unable to decide wether it wants to be a strategic RPG(ish), or a fast paced RTS. But instead of an inventive and fun mix of the two, they've taken the worst aspects of both genres and mashed them together to make an incredibly frustrating experience. You just can't have such an unbelievable inconvenient UI and control scheme in such a fast paced game.

There are lots of strange things about the gameplay itself that might have made sense with a better tutorial. Why is the fighting character unable to win against a single guard? Why can't any of the other party member help her fight? Why do the thieves not try to stay hidden automatically? When is that ever not better than being visible? Again, there might be an explanation for these things, but the tutorial doesn't bloody tell you.

After inevitably failing the initial training heist, I was simply dumped into the main game seemingly without any way to attempt the training mission again.

This product would've needed at least another six months of testing imo. Do not buy unless you are severely masochistic.

The "Heist" mode, the action-oriented gameplay of the game, plays a lot like This War of MIne's scavanger runs. Outside of the those the game seems to offer more world exploring and rpg-like character building for those willing to look around and work past the controls. The terrible, god-awful control mapping is the biggest blunder of the game for me and my limited play time. Pausing requires you to press 'P', hide from guards by pressing 'H', the thieves are bound to number keys, while the camera is controlled using your mouse - meanwhile, spacebar does nothing and the devs have decided not to include options to rebind anything.

Edit: I just want to make it clear that the game itself doesn't seem bad, it's something I would enjoy very much, if the controls weren't so counter-intuitive, but controls and interface in a game really can make or break it.

Lost to the UI boss. The game's control are very unintuitive and this isn't helped by the lack of any meaningful tutorial. Interactions are also not consistent. It feels like whatever playtesting this game got, it got with the devs standing over thesholders of the play testers instructing them how to play the game.

Also the guard AI is weird as fuck. Why are guards patrolling inside multiple buildings? Why does me running into a building not trigger reaction, but leaving one door open causes them to stare for eternity at it? Speaking of which, the game has a really poor mechanic where when a character is stealthed in a room they have a non-replinshable stealth meter that slowly ticks until they're exposed. The problem with this mechanic is that there is no real way manipulate the guard AI and it for some reason likes to just stand and stare at random rooms for long periods of time. If you got unlucky and it's staring at the room you're in, the only way to rescue your thief is to send the one thief you get that stabs things, to stab the crap out of the guard.

Overall despite the pretty art, lore, and concept, this is clearly a game that could've used the early access treatment to catch these issues. This is definetly not ready for a 1.0 release.