Monaco (PC)
The spirit of stealth lives on in this insane top-down cooperative stealth game. You’ll break into banks together, kill guards together, hump corpses together, and pee together- no matter how you look at it, Monaco is a good time.
In Monaco, every player fills a different role- Player 1, for example, is responsible for getting shit done, for making sure we’ve finished the objective and can move on with our lives. Player 2 is in charge of grabbing all the coins and making sure there aren’t enough for everyone else to refuel their weapons, and really to just be a dick in whatever way she can, luring guards to your hiding spot, throwing a wrench into Player 1’s plans and making victory as infuriatingly impossible as possible. Player 3 is in charge of dying and wasting everyone’s time in whatever way he can, while Player 4 attempts to hold the group together, reviving Player 3, helping Player 1, and punishing Player 2.
Oh, and there’s also classes I guess, which interact with the map and guards in different ways. But I wouldn’t really know since Player 1 was rushing through everything without giving me a chance to explore, and Player 2 was always bringing the guards to where I was trying to hack into the computers, and Player 4, bless his heart, was always waiting in a nearby bush, ready to revive me.
Anyway, there’s like a story that’s told from different perspectives or something, and between missions the characters talk to each other and stuff, but really we just used the opportunity to throw our voices and give the characters personalities they really had no business having. I bet you didn’t know the Red-head was a man, the Mole a sex addict, the Hacker a red-neck, and the Lookout Batman. I don’t remember the writing at all, honestly, since we just made our own stuff up, but you’re going to have to trust me when I say it was really good and maybe you should try paying attention.
But yeah, people say the game is really fun when your team works together and make it through a tense heist without being spotted. I wouldn’t know. Player 2 never let that happen, and that one guy who definitely wasn’t me or related to me in anyway was always rushing ahead and dying before we could even survey the perimeter.
Definitely get together with a group of your three once-closest friends and have yourselves a good time with Monaco. But trust me- once you hit that last level, for your own safety, make sure you’re sitting nowhere near Player 2.
God, Player 2 was such a bitch.
Metro: Last Light (PS3)
I never bought this game- I never planned to. My cousin bought it for his PS3 that he didn’t have yet, and since he didn’t have his PS3 yet (he wanted to see if there was a price drop at E3), he shipped it to our house for us to run through its paces first. What a great guy.
I never expected Metro: Last Light was going to be half Power Stealth, half monster-shooter going into it (since I never played the first). But holy moly is Metro: LL exactly that.
Every section versus humans is amazing fun. The player controls the light in the environment in such a way as to direct the AI, and force them to fear you. Putting out the lights and sneaking through the world to get in position to headshot as many baddies as efficiently as possible reminded me of the Gamecube era 007 titles (some of my favorite shooters of all time). Power stealth at its best.
The monster sections weren’t quite as fun, throwing out the awesome stealth elements for fast moving, annoying monsters that really didn’t know when to quit. But every time one of these moments ended, I was returned to the awesome versus-humans segments. It’s like how they say you don’t know true happiness if you haven’t been sad. The monster segments make you appreciate the stealth segments all the more.
I really enjoyed Last Light for those moments when I approached a huge room full of guys, lights, hidden passages, and lots of hiding places. Entering these segments meant I got to survey the entire premise, make a plan of action for taking out every baddie, and waltz out with as much ammo as possible. These were especially tense and enjoyable when it came down to my aiming needing to be spot on: those moments three guys stood together, and the only way through them stealthily was to headshot all three of them in a second or two. Knowing a single miss would send the whole plan to the bottom floor made lining up that first shot and hesitating over the trigger all the more intense.
One moment I will probably remember for a very long time to come was when, in just such a segment, I badly messed up and ran scared shitless in search of a hiding place- I didn’t get far before I found myself in a dead end, the baddies pouring in, funneling from every part of the environment to find me. The last stand that followed ran my magazines dry, and while some people might decry the AI’s hornet-like intelligence, I found it to be cinematic and dramatic in its own strange and special way. It took almost all of my ammo and forced me to be perfect for the next half hour to recoup, but it was definitely worth it to see the corpses pile up at my feet.