No Plan B

Forgotten indie game of the week (26/04/21)

Welcome back to ‘Forgotten indie game of the week’. This week I’m going to do things slightly differently. Normally I review a game that was released last week and didn’t get the attention that it deserved, but this week I didn’t really feel that special connection with any of the newly released games. But there was one game that piqued my interest, ‘No Plan B’. Though it hasn’t fully released yet, they did release the prologue last week.

About the game:

‘No plan B’ is a tactical top-down shooter, where you do not control any of the characters directly but rather plan a mission and watch how it unravels. The game is made mostly by a one-man gamedev team, GFX47 Games.

The prologue is freely available on Steam, with the full release being later this year with no specific date or price given yet.

Website: https://noplanbgame.com
Steam link: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1584810/No_Plan_B_Prologue

For this review I will only be playing the prologue, so I cannot give my opinion on the full game yet. Please take note that this game is still in active development, so things can and probably will change a lot before the final release. If you are interested in the game please follow the official game channels for more information.

Gameplay:

The gameplay of ‘No Plan B’ is relatively simple. First you start off with a planning room, and in here you prepare your whole operation. This planning room is mostly the same as the regular version, with the exception that you can’t see any of the enemies and it looks slightly different visually.

The first step of the planning is picking the starting positions of your characters and equipping them with the gear you want them to carry on this mission. Next you plan out the entire heist chronologically. You draw the path you want each character to watch, which corners to watch, to open doors slowly or if you want to kick them open, and where and how to use explosives/smoke grenades/flashbangs.

Once you are ready with planning everything out, you execute the mission. From this point onwards you have no control over what your characters do anymore. They act solely on the plans you made during the first phase. You can however pause or rewind the video back and forth to see where things went wrong. After the mission has unfolded you can either choose to go back to the drawing board or if you are satisfied how the mission played out continue onwards with the next.

The missions start off simple with a tutorial teaching how to properly control your characters. But once you continue on with the regular missions, you notice that it’s not as simple as it seemed.

Managing multiple people to coordinate perfectly, while not knowing what challenges they might face behind each closed door takes quite some planning with a lot of trial and error. Personally I found it was very easy to lose your overview of the situation, and regularly had a character that was just standing around doing nothing or was completely mistimed. But I blame this on the overwhelmingness of still getting used to the game. I imagine that after playing a few more missions, I won’t make these beginner mistakes anymore. But since this is only a small demo I couldn’t fully get into the gameplay as much as I liked.

What I liked about the gameplay was the variety. Not only do you play with both the good and bad guys, you also have a wide selection of objectives such as eliminate all hostiles, secure a location or exfiltrate your team, amongst many others.

There could be a bit more variety in weapon selection and gear, such as different types of armor and other tools, but the developer said more weapons were going to be added later on. So we will have to see what the full version has to offer.

Now onto what I didn’t like about the game. Personally I’m not a big fan of the tutorial mode. First you are forced to look at a video clip of what you need to do, and then you have to mimic the video exactly even for the really easy parts. Just showing a short tip and letting me figure out how to complete the objective would be more enjoyable. Especially since the tutorial is a sequence of seperate levels each with their own simple objective such as walking, opening doors, interacting with objects… The video is nice for if you are stuck, but being forced to watch it feels very tedious.

Secondly the controls felt a bit clumsy sometimes. Like I said earlier, it’s partly because I’m not used to the game completely. But I feel like there could be some small improvements here to make it easier for people just starting off. For example to create a path for your characters to walk, you need to draw a line on the floor. The problem here is that it’s pretty hard to make straight lines without having an occasional bump in the line, forcing you to rewind time a bit and redraw part of the path.

All by all I feel like the gameplay is already at a very solid base. It still needs a bit of polish to make it feel perfect, and some additional options to keep the game interesting. But other than that it’s already pretty fun to play.

Graphics:

The environment and the characters have a very low poly stylized art style, and I feel that this works really well for the game. It makes it easier to see what is going on in the levels and let you focus more on what matters. The only thing I feel that is missing here are some small visual clues to make the game even more clear, such as highlights around the player characters and hostiles. Because while watching the mission unfold, it can get pretty hectic.
And you don’t want the player to miss on some critical details.

I’m also not really a fan of the user interface style. The UI is just big simple colored rectangles with a white icon on top. Which gives the game a bit of a cheap mobile game feeling. This is however just a personal preference, as the buttons are functional and clear.

Bugs:

So far I haven’t encountered any major bugs. There are a few small annoyances, such as hovering over two characters or items close to each other triggers both selection wheels overlapping. And some extra polish would be nice for the final release of the game, such as a bit smoother character animations and better reaction speed for both the player characters and enemies. Since now they often react a bit on the slow side. But overall I didn’t have any big problems while playing the game.

Conclusion:

The base game that you can play in the prologue is already very solid, and I think people who do enjoy tactical shooter games are definitely going to have a blast playing this game. I do hope that for the main game the gameplay would be extended a bit more with new cool tools, weapons and locations. As I feel like with the amount of content that the prologue currently shows, it might get a bit repetitive after a while.

I’m also very curious to see what the developer is going to come up with for the campaign mode, and I hope it includes a decent storyline with characters you can bond with and maybe upgrade if you do well, or have some sort of monetization reward for doing well. Because currently there isn’t really a reason why you would replay missions other than getting a better rating and spot on the leaderboard.

My opinion as a game developer:

It’s nice to see that the developer is already actively promoting his game early on in the development process through youtube, twitter,… And now also through this “demo”. This doesn’t only give the chance for people to learn more about the game, but they can also give feedback which hopefully will make the game better when it finally releases.

The people who like this type of genre will definitely enjoy themselves with this game, and I think that the actual release of the game will be quite a big hit in those communities. Though personally I don’t think it will appeal to the broader gaming community. Mainly because it’s a bit of a niche genre and I don’t think the mainstream gamer will be attracted by the simplified art style. But I would love to be proven wrong.

For me, I will definitely be following this game more in the future to see what improvements will be made for the final release and I hope I will see you there as well.

So what can you do as a gamer?:

If ‘No Plan B’ seems interesting to you, go download and play the prologue and while you are at it wishlist the full game as well. You can also support the developers by following them on social media or other channels, and interacting with the community around their games.

This of course doesn’t only apply to ‘No Plan B’, but every game you have enjoyed and want to support and encourage the developers of. The harsh reality is that there are thousands of forgotten indie games out there, waiting to be discovered by the right people.

Last week alone 180 new games were released, many of them still waiting to be discovered.

Good luck, and thank you for reading.

~Vincent