LET'S ROB A BANK

There is a tradition of games in which you can select different squad members for different missions, the aim being to maximise the match between your squad’s capabilities and the challenges you will face in this particular situation. The Syndicate/X-Com games do this, as do some of the Mass Effect games, if I’m not mistaken. There’s something like this in LET’S ROB A BANK, except that here you are doing only a single mission, which makes sense, since you’re planning to make so much money that you’ll never have to work again.

The bank robbery will unfold in a variety of different ways depending on whom you put in your squad and which choices you make during the robbery itself. (The latter are in general far less consequential than the former.) Some of these differences make perfect sense: take the muscle guy who hates drivers and the irritable driver, and infighting will doom your effort. Other differences make absolutely no sense at all. There’s one squad member whom you cannot really choose, because taking her on board will always coincide with the total destruction of the world. Frankly, this feels less like a serious possibility and more like something put in at the last moment when the author realised they wouldn’t have the time to develop content involving this character.

The different ways in which the robbery can develop are often pretty entertaining, and you’ll probably see a few losing ones before you hit on a winning ending. A fun diversion, but I didn’t feel compelled to hunt for all the endings.

This is a shortish replayable twine game where you assemble a team for a heist. You choose people for different roles, such as getaway driver, then see what happens.

It seems like a very branchy game, but a big chunk of branches are eliminated early on by one choice, making it smaller than it seems. The styling is non-existent, using the standard Twine design and formatting.

The characters are memorable, though. It's pretty intense for a humor game, and I played it several times.

In LET'S ROB A BANK you must assemble a team of three accomplices to help you, well, rob a bank. Each accomplice has different attributes that may or may not mesh well with those of other accomplices. Each playthrough is short, encouraging you to try combinations of accomplices, as well as choices once inside the bank. As can be expected, there are lots of different endings. The game gives you "stats" with most of the endings, too. These tell you
(Spoiler - click to show)1. Whether you successfully robbed the bank.
2. Whether you successfully escaped.
3. How many accomplices you had left at the end.

One of the accomplices reminded me a lot of (Spoiler - click to show)the title character in last year's movie Baby Driver. I'm guessing this similarity was intended.

One thing I particularly appreciated seeing was how often the accomplices would get into fights with and/or double-cross each other. For me, this gave the game some darker overtones than the sort of light comedy feel it might have had otherwise.

While the game does some interesting things with combining the accomplices' different skills, some of this could have been fleshed out more. There were two characters in particular, (Spoiler - click to show)Amy Hawkins and Lucy Honeysuckle, whose descriptions implied more interesting interactions than I was able to uncover. (Well, for the latter, there is one very interesting and amusing effect, but it appears to be the only effect you get when you choose that character. This means that 1/3 of the possible combinations for your team only have this one ending.)

LET'S ROB A BANK isn't trying to do anything other than entertain you for a while, and it succeeds at that. Each playthrough is probably between 5 and 10 minutes long, so it's definitely worth playing.