American Theft 80s - Unassuming but tasteful

The phrase "GTA clone" immediately conjures up initial expectations of the game, and one of these clones is American Theft 80s. And let there come out at least 10 parts of GTA, there will always be those who need something more: someone wants madness, unused entourage and time dilation, like in Max Payne - here's Total Overdose; if you want more gangster trashes in the main plot - here you have Saints Row II, which will raise the insanity degree to the obscene values; maybe you want to change the usual American high-rises for something eastern? - Then Yakuza.

As the years passed, the number of GTA clones increased, more and more developers were trying to get a piece of the pie; however quantity doesn't mean quality, so dozens of useless games were released, and the ugliest GTA clones were released on smartphones. And to be honest, I initially perceived American Theft 80s as just another low-quality production. Have my expectations been met?

Jack the Ripper...pockets

Not really bothering with exposition, American Theft 80s immediately throws the player into the thick of things. Our protagonist, a certain burglar Jack, has made an attempt on a very big score - a robbery of the mayor's house. As always, something goes wrong, Jack gets bracelets on his hands and is sent to places not so far away.

However, Jack is not destined to serve his time, and someone lends him a helping hand, or rather, the keys to his cell. The robber escapes from the police station and takes to the old...

The story in American Theft 80s as such is very small and is needed only for a tick, so that somehow logically justify the lawlessness of the thieves that Jack makes. The folks at Noble Muffins didn't really bother with the script and, oddly enough, they got it right. The tense plot and flat character of the protagonist strain only in the first hour of the game. Tasks a la "go get it" are rarely diluted with any interesting tasks, descending to banal theft and car theft.

Jack's fate doesn't boast any spectacular events, this is not CJ, who has seen nothing but funerals in his hometown. American Theft 80s is about something else, which is...

Grand Theft Auto is back to its roots... Well, almost.

Before American Theft 80s, Noble Muffins already had experience in developing similar games. In 2018 they released Thieft Simulator, a game in which the main task was to take out of the houses of innocent tenants everything that was not bolted to the floor. American Theft 80s is a continuation of those ideas, but with much more freedom of action: instead of apartments in Thieft Simulator, American Theft 80s' storytelling takes place on the scale of a small American town divided into regions. But if we compare our present subject with GTA, the freedom in the first one is much less - the town in American Theft 80s is fenced, you can't leave it, you can't steal any of the cars you like either.

The main character in American Theft 80s is all about silent robbery. No terrorist attacks in a tank, where the entire city police can't oppose a cheater with an arsenal in his jeans pocket, no armies of special forces crumbling under machine-gun bursts, in American Theft 80s everything is strict with this - the player is tasked to steal and remain unnoticed:

Despite the fact that American Theft 80s' budget is immediately apparent, the indie game shows a surprisingly high love of detail. For a heist, Jack is required to wear dark clothing. Once he disguises himself as a thief, he doesn't need the extra attention of the locals - the onlookers will definitely call the police if they are convinced that this is a thief in front of them.

You can only change clothes in the car, the car in American Theft 80s serves many purposes - in the trunk and interior of the car you have to transport the loot, in the car all our costumes and "professional" accessories are kept, in the car you can also take a nap until the sun goes down over the horizon. We're robbing at night.

No one will let us just walk into the house and "vacuum" up everything of value; Jack's briefcase only holds a couple or three valuable items. Everything except cash takes some space in the backpack, and especially heavy items - televisions, video players, tape recorders - and will have to be carried in two hands and hidden directly in the trunk, rather than throw dust in the cabin. In order to steal something dimensionally important, one has to open the trunk, find a place for the conditional TV set, place the TV set and close the trunk. Again, the onlookers should not suspect anything.

American Theft 80s isn't limited to messing with Jack's pocket capacity, stealth, and changing into casual clothes after a robbery or into "professional" clothes before a theft. The more Jack prances around the neighborhood, the more often the police will patrol the area. You can sneak into the manor unnoticed by quietly picking locks, but if anyone notices signs of a break-in, the police will soon arrive. All the player has to do is run. At the end of each turn, the game will evaluate your progress and give you a score:

Jack gets experience points for each item he steals. At this point American Theft 80s begins to gradually pull the player into the grip of immersiveness: with each level the player gets a point, which he spends in the skill branch. The skill tree does not shine with variation, but it significantly affects the gameplay: at the beginning we have the simplest skills - breaking doors with a picklock; but then Jack learns to use pliers, a glass cutter, stealing a car, and generally succeeds in his "profession".

Jack buys new gadgets at the pawn shop, where he sells his loot. By the way, there is a skill in the game, thanks to which Jack knows the objective price of stolen items. This is a subtlety of the thieving profession... which Noble Muffins decided to cleverly emphasize.

In the screenshot, I'm selling sneakers, a frying pan, a cassette tape, and a record player-not a bad haul by the standards of the game, but I don't get paid much for them. The pawnbrokers are almost always pretty mean about what you bring them to sell, and they live off of it.

You don't want to scold American Theft 80s at all, everything in the game is done simply but with soul. You can see the effort of the developers to make a candy from their game. The game is full of conventions and quite realistic complications: you can not leave your car on the roadway for a long time, then a tow truck will come and send your car to the impound lot. It's almost unreal to pass the missions without a car, so Jack has to steal his own car or pay the fine; the longer we steal our dark deeds, the more the police take it out on us - to cool the ardor of the law, look for a corrupt cop in the dirty places. The cop agrees for a small amount of money to make your misdeeds overlooked, the same cop sells and confidential information about the tenants - their daily routine, how rich they are, etc. Saves in American Theft 80s are also stylized for the eighties era - in a phone booth, and quick moves are designed as bus routes. Almost all of the game's conventions are somehow justified by the developer, all of American Theft 80s' mechanics are logical and work for immersion, and pumping doesn't make Jack a killing machine, he just learns thievery better. Use and buy thieves inventory can not be without the appropriate skills, so buy up the whole pawnshop "to grow" does not get, grind portion.

In American Theft 80s you will have to prepare for quests quite thoroughly: sometimes you will have to learn the daily routine of your tenants, when and where they spend their time; sometimes you will have to resort to tricks and use a glass cutter, sometimes - even dress up as an electrician and supposedly check fuses in the house, but in fact steal keys, and in general you'll be able to get the future hoard. However, you shouldn't count on any sensible social stealth, in the same Hitman this mechanics is implemented by three heads above, in American Theft 80s pretending to be another person for a long time will not work, no matter how hard you try - after a while you will still uncover. The moment of discovery is sometimes accompanied by funny situations: Jack, dressed as an electrician, rings the bell at two in the morning as if nothing had happened. Strangely enough, the tenants do not chase him away, but answer him something along the lines of "Who are you, I didn't call you... come in, but don't wait for payment. A minute and a half later, the tenants realize that it turns out that there is an intruder in their house. The tenants attack the pseudo-electrician with their fists and call the police, even though the player did not give himself away in any way...

As for lock picking, American Theft 80s prefers not to reinvent the wheel and resorts to the classic minigames. However, the lock picking is simple but tasteful, just like everything else in the game:

However, in addition to successful solutions American Theft 80s is full of dubious solutions, replete with its cheapness. About this in the next module...

Too indie game...

The first thing that immediately strikes the eye when you first meet American Theft 80s is a very cheap performance. Yes, the indie industry in all its glory: here you have fifteen years old graphics - cheesy facial animation, cardboard character and driving physics; and the cardboard nature of what happens - the world in American Theft 80s is extremely flat and static, having crashed into a small tree, Jack goes into the stratosphere; and, of course, invisible walls - in the story mode the player is not allowed to leave the tiny area, until he has completed all the tasks. The area is enclosed by an impenetrable barrier of one car.

No parkour in American Theft 80s is out of the question, everything is scripted: if Jack, according to the story, cannot climb over a half-meter fence, then for the player it is like a Chinese wall. Sometimes the division of the in-game world catches the eye too much: Jack has a fence in front of him that any eleven-year-old bully would climb over, but no! Jack honors the thieves' code and looks for a door to pick the lock. This rule also works the other way around - if a policeman chases you, just climb up a meter high hill, the cop will consider it an insurmountable obstacle and blunt you on the spot.

The flatness of the world is also particularly striking while driving cars. The developers bought the vehicle engine for only $60, and the quality is appropriate: the cars are driven like pieces of soap, there is no skid or destructibility, and you can't accelerate over 60 miles per hour - there is a speed limiter. But the speed limit is a very clever move by Noble Muffins, they killed two birds with one stone: in terms of logic, the speed limit complies with the laws, and the protagonist prefers not to attract too much attention from the police; in technical terms, the restriction allows the game not to freeze during loading textures, and in general hides the fact that the machines have no destruction system in principle. This is how Noble Muffins brilliantly justified the technical limitations of their game.

But police chases are the weakest part of American Theft 80s. Firstly, the police run faster than Jack, and secondly, the police cars are always faster than the protagonist's car, and as soon as the patrol car touches the protagonist's car, its engine immediately stops. You can't resist the police in American Theft 80s, at best you can run away or hide in a dumpster. Again, this is where the flaw in the stupid artificial intelligence comes into play - the cops can lose sight of Jack literally under their noses.

There are no shootouts in American Theft 80s either, alas, Jack is a thief, not an assassin. If you get caught in the clutches of the police, you have to fight back with your hands, and even this maneuver works only 1-2 times, Jack is quickly exhausted, gets a blow in the beard and goes to jail. And if in GTA after his death at the hands of police the main character lost his weapon, he was patched up and released on all fours, but in American Theft 80s the prison is the end, download the last preservation. By the way, I would recommend saving more often, sometimes the scripts fail, and you fail the mission through no fault of the game.

And the last thing we have to blame American Theft 80s for is inadequately high requirements for an extremely budget picture. Noble Muffins has hardly worked on the optimization, so for some reason such a simple-looking game requires.

NVidia GeForce GTX 1060, Intel Core i5 processor and as much as 16 GB of RAM. For a minute, that's higher than Cyberpunk 2077...

However, at times American Theft 80s reminds you that it was made in 2022, the picture here is quite tolerable to play with light and shadows:

From time to time glimpsed bugs textures and "joys" of graphic artifacts. For example, in one of the missions of my Jack pretended to be a Shaolin monk and soared above the ground, the next day in the city began to happen hell, a crosswalk appeared, then disappeared before his eyes ... just a plot for "X-Files" ...

Is it worth it?

Definitely recommend the game I can not, as well as unequivocally dissuade from buying. Fortunately in Steam you can pass the prologue for free. Despite the fact that the game is not disclosed at all in the prologue, you can at least appreciate the graphics in American Theft 80s - this is one of the reasons for which the game is commonly scolded.

Otherwise, it's a classic indie game with daring ideas, made with soul, but very clumsily. But American Theft 80s costs pennies - about $5 without discounts - so it's worth looking into as a fun leisure game.