Hitman is a decade old and successful, but not many studios have really done much with what makes it great. The dense, immersive sandbox environment made for such an amazing comedic stealth game with a ton of content. Nobody did much with it… at least, not until Snap & Grab from the fun indie developer No Goblin.
This game starts like the World of Assassination trilogy, as an episodic game with the first location to play in at launch. You can complete all the heists and challenges it offers while you wait for more. This could make for a great game if it’s ready for launch. Snap & Grab is mostly there from what I’ve played so far, but has plenty of work that’s needed to reach its potential.
Snap & Grab stars Nifty Nevada, the world’s best fashion photographer in 1987 who gets invited to the biggest parties to take great photos of the hottest celebrities in the world. That skill also seems to make her the best person at planning heists. Her team could use photos to ID and steal the best items at these parties. The first party member you start with is a big, lumbering brute that carries around the biggest items. Then the second person you get after the initial tutorial is a party girl who can talk to guards to distract them. Of course, being a criminal mastermind does come with a bit of heat as you get to see a good bit of Detective Rio Rivers in the opening, and she’s got some questions for the big-name photographer.
Erik Pop and his very silly painting
The first and only location in Snap & Grab is Erik Pop’s big penthouse party. This is a very funny joke for those that are aware of director Dan Teasdale’s history at Harmonix, where he worked with community guy Eric Pope and his iconic look among developers that you’d see at Giant Bomb’s E3 events. He’s parodied here as Erik Pop, an eccentric rich man that owns this big penthouse featuring a very large, garish painting of himself that you see on the wall opposite of the elevator that you use to get to his apartment.
This location is four floors of chaos with lots of things to steal. The most important thing to steal at first is a giant key tied to the lease for the apartment. Whoever is in possession of the key has the apartment. That’s a very dumb, but great premise. Detective Rio Rivers notices that Nifty is now living in the apartment–and it had been robbed at the party. Nifty manages to dodge Rio’s many questions by claiming that she bought the key using her immense wealth and the apartment that came with it. It works well enough to get the cop out of her way for now, as Nifty gets her Saints Row The Third-style base of operations in order.
Snap & Grab doesn’t really work the way that you might expect with its Hitman influence being so obvious. You are more of a passive participant in the heist as Nifty photographs various items. The people scattered throughout the level add to your plan for how the heist should play out. As you try to steal the giant key held by a large ice statue, you have a number of options for how to accomplish it. Obviously you have ideas like melting the statue or breaking it apart. You also need to deal with nearby guards, so you may need to use food to dirty them up or find other ways to distract them.
There are areas where you cannot walk through without trespassing, so you have options to either distract guards so you can get past them or knock their hats off so that you can walk around safely in their areas. Unlike in Hitman, there’s no real challenge to any of this stealth stuff, as the worst thing that happens is that you may just get reloaded back to a safe area if you’re trespassing too long.
Spoilers: You’ll get to steal a tiger cub from Erik Pop at some point.
This planning is done on a timeline screen that starts small for the tutorial, but is at 10 parts after the opening, where you put the photos you’ve taken with some form of context as to whether you’re grabbing the item that’s pictured, doing something to a guard in the photo, or whatever else is going on. Once you have a second party member, you can spread out the responsibilities between the two and make use of their individual abilities to form a more efficient plan, along with being able to steal multiple items. When you’re ready to have your team perform the heist, you get a fun series of videos of each person doing their part of the mission, with a big green checkmark, or a failure video when it goes poorly, thus ending that run. With failure, you often get a hint of what you might have missed as you try to figure out how to fix things to achieve success.
The depth of content in Snap & Grab comes into play as you return to the globe and pick a locale to visit — it’s presented as a book with many more activities. The book features both heists and photo challenges. The latter presents you with an artist’s drawing of a scenario you must find or create around that location, which doesn’t have to be perfect as long as it counts. Those photo challenges use the winning picture as the cover of some tabloid magazine, which is a fun touch. For completing these missions, you get stars to spend in your new apartment to unlock new spots for your ill-gotten goods, though the wall spots can also be used to frame the actual photos you’ve taken and not just the paintings you can steal from Erik Pop’s apartment. The last bit of content you can do here includes stealing everything from the apartment and filling out the photo catalog, which lists all of the various things you can photograph in each section of the apartment and gives you hints as to what you’re looking for in these areas if you’re not sure what to look for.
Erik Pop has a corgi named Erik Pup. Perfect.
I mentioned at the beginning that I feel that Snap & Grab mostly succeeds in what it’s doing, but that there’s still a lot of work I hope to see get done after what I’ve played of this game so far. It’s often very rough around the edges and the devs do have an update for launch that should help out to some degree, but I can’t imagine all of the issues I’ve seen will get fixed.
The worst issue I’ve had happened during the heist itself, where I’ve seen the same sequence of events play out differently, like it’s bugging out. Paintings tend to bug out at times and lose the art while one of my teammates is holding them, so it just looks like a weird frame. The performance dips on occasion on this new PC, and the menus easily cause bugs by pausing the heist while it’s playing out. I’ve also had the planning screen bug out, refusing to let me add new items even when there’s room, so I have to delete something to get it to work again. There is also another issue where you can’t view the planning screen without adding something to it when I feel like that should be an option at some point. I’d also like to see a faster way to get to the photo archive of everything you’ve selected. Since it’s so slow to navigate these menus to find the specific thing you need for your timeline, I’d sometimes just run to that part of the physical environment to take a photo for a faster way to do it. There also needs to be a way to skip through the different parts of the heist sequence and an option to skip it when you know you’re going to fail, as it does get old when you see the same parts over and over again.
The other issue I’ve had is that I’m not always great when it comes to solving very complex puzzles, but the heist for the hidden safe has completely stumped me at this point after an hour trying to figure it out. Every other heist has been very easy to figure out, but this one seems like I’m either the dumbest person ever to play games or something has bugged out to block me from doing it. It involved a safe that’s hidden behind a painting where obviously something will cause the painting to pop open yet nothing I’ve tried using notes that are right next to it has worked, so I’ve been pretty frustrated on this one. I would not be surprised if I’m just missing the most obvious thing possible, but that’s how it goes for these kinds of situations in some games for me. The game is generally good at guiding you through these heists if you’re having trouble, and this is the first one that seems to just not have anything to help me.
These magazine covers are very good.
Those issues aside, I’ve had a lot of fun with Snap & Grab and have high hopes that the team will keep working to improve the game, since we have until June to release the second episode with a new area to explore. The downside to taking direct inspiration from Hitman is that if you’re not as polished and well-designed as that 10-year-old classic, the issues stick out more, even when it’s from a small team. The game makes up for those issues with a lot of charm and good fun, plus the updates that have been coming out during this review process have improved it enough that I expect to see this game get much better as each episode is released. I wouldn’t blame people who want to wait for more or all the episodes to be released, especially given the game’s rough shape at launch. It’s only out on PC at launch but it will be available on PS5 and Xbox in the future.
itman is a decade old and successful, but not many studios have really done much with what makes it great. The dense, immersive sandbox environment made for such an amazing comedic stealth game with a ton of content. Nobody did much with it… at least, not until Snap & Grab from the fun indie developer No Goblin.
Hitman is a decade old and successful, but not many studios have really done much with what makes it great. The dense, immersive sandbox environment made for such an amazing comedic stealth game with a ton of content. Nobody did much with it… at least, not until Snap & Grab from the fun indie developer No Goblin.
This game starts like the World of Assassination trilogy, as an episodic game with the first location to play in at launch. You can complete all the heists and challenges it offers while you wait for more. This could make for a great game if it’s ready for launch. Snap & Grab is mostly there from what I’ve played so far, but has plenty of work that’s needed to reach its potential.
Snap & Grab stars Nifty Nevada, the world’s best fashion photographer in 1987 who gets invited to the biggest parties to take great photos of the hottest celebrities in the world. That skill also seems to make her the best person at planning heists. Her team could use photos to ID and steal the best items at these parties. The first party member you start with is a big, lumbering brute that carries around the biggest items. Then the second person you get after the initial tutorial is a party girl who can talk to guards to distract them. Of course, being a criminal mastermind does come with a bit of heat as you get to see a good bit of Detective Rio Rivers in the opening, and she’s got some questions for the big-name photographer.
Erik Pop and his very silly painting
The first and only location in Snap & Grab is Erik Pop’s big penthouse party. This is a very funny joke for those that are aware of director Dan Teasdale’s history at Harmonix, where he worked with community guy Eric Pope and his iconic look among developers that you’d see at Giant Bomb’s E3 events. He’s parodied here as Erik Pop, an eccentric rich man that owns this big penthouse featuring a very large, garish painting of himself that you see on the wall opposite of the elevator that you use to get to his apartment.
This location is four floors of chaos with lots of things to steal. The most important thing to steal at first is a giant key tied to the lease for the apartment. Whoever is in possession of the key has the apartment. That’s a very dumb, but great premise. Detective Rio Rivers notices that Nifty is now living in the apartment–and it had been robbed at the party. Nifty manages to dodge Rio’s many questions by claiming that she bought the key using her immense wealth and the apartment that came with it. It works well enough to get the cop out of her way for now, as Nifty gets her Saints Row The Third-style base of operations in order.
Snap & Grab doesn’t really work the way that you might expect with its Hitman influence being so obvious. You are more of a passive participant in the heist as Nifty photographs various items. The people scattered throughout the level add to your plan for how the heist should play out. As you try to steal the giant key held by a large ice statue, you have a number of options for how to accomplish it. Obviously you have ideas like melting the statue or breaking it apart. You also need to deal with nearby guards, so you may need to use food to dirty them up or find other ways to distract them.
There are areas where you cannot walk through without trespassing, so you have options to either distract guards so you can get past them or knock their hats off so that you can walk around safely in their areas. Unlike in Hitman, there’s no real challenge to any of this stealth stuff, as the worst thing that happens is that you may just get reloaded back to a safe area if you’re trespassing too long.
Spoilers: You’ll get to steal a tiger cub from Erik Pop at some point.
This planning is done on a timeline screen that starts small for the tutorial, but is at 10 parts after the opening, where you put the photos you’ve taken with some form of context as to whether you’re grabbing the item that’s pictured, doing something to a guard in the photo, or whatever else is going on. Once you have a second party member, you can spread out the responsibilities between the two and make use of their individual abilities to form a more efficient plan, along with being able to steal multiple items. When you’re ready to have your team perform the heist, you get a fun series of videos of each person doing their part of the mission, with a big green checkmark, or a failure video when it goes poorly, thus ending that run. With failure, you often get a hint of what you might have missed as you try to figure out how to fix things to achieve success.
The depth of content in Snap & Grab comes into play as you return to the globe and pick a locale to visit — it’s presented as a book with many more activities. The book features both heists and photo challenges. The latter presents you with an artist’s drawing of a scenario you must find or create around that location, which doesn’t have to be perfect as long as it counts. Those photo challenges use the winning picture as the cover of some tabloid magazine, which is a fun touch. For completing these missions, you get stars to spend in your new apartment to unlock new spots for your ill-gotten goods, though the wall spots can also be used to frame the actual photos you’ve taken and not just the paintings you can steal from Erik Pop’s apartment. The last bit of content you can do here includes stealing everything from the apartment and filling out the photo catalog, which lists all of the various things you can photograph in each section of the apartment and gives you hints as to what you’re looking for in these areas if you’re not sure what to look for.
Erik Pop has a corgi named Erik Pup. Perfect.
I mentioned at the beginning that I feel that Snap & Grab mostly succeeds in what it’s doing, but that there’s still a lot of work I hope to see get done after what I’ve played of this game so far. It’s often very rough around the edges and the devs do have an update for launch that should help out to some degree, but I can’t imagine all of the issues I’ve seen will get fixed.
The worst issue I’ve had happened during the heist itself, where I’ve seen the same sequence of events play out differently, like it’s bugging out. Paintings tend to bug out at times and lose the art while one of my teammates is holding them, so it just looks like a weird frame. The performance dips on occasion on this new PC, and the menus easily cause bugs by pausing the heist while it’s playing out. I’ve also had the planning screen bug out, refusing to let me add new items even when there’s room, so I have to delete something to get it to work again. There is also another issue where you can’t view the planning screen without adding something to it when I feel like that should be an option at some point. I’d also like to see a faster way to get to the photo archive of everything you’ve selected. Since it’s so slow to navigate these menus to find the specific thing you need for your timeline, I’d sometimes just run to that part of the physical environment to take a photo for a faster way to do it. There also needs to be a way to skip through the different parts of the heist sequence and an option to skip it when you know you’re going to fail, as it does get old when you see the same parts over and over again.
The other issue I’ve had is that I’m not always great when it comes to solving very complex puzzles, but the heist for the hidden safe has completely stumped me at this point after an hour trying to figure it out. Every other heist has been very easy to figure out, but this one seems like I’m either the dumbest person ever to play games or something has bugged out to block me from doing it. It involved a safe that’s hidden behind a painting where obviously something will cause the painting to pop open yet nothing I’ve tried using notes that are right next to it has worked, so I’ve been pretty frustrated on this one. I would not be surprised if I’m just missing the most obvious thing possible, but that’s how it goes for these kinds of situations in some games for me. The game is generally good at guiding you through these heists if you’re having trouble, and this is the first one that seems to just not have anything to help me.
These magazine covers are very good.
Those issues aside, I’ve had a lot of fun with Snap & Grab and have high hopes that the team will keep working to improve the game, since we have until June to release the second episode with a new area to explore. The downside to taking direct inspiration from Hitman is that if you’re not as polished and well-designed as that 10-year-old classic, the issues stick out more, even when it’s from a small team. The game makes up for those issues with a lot of charm and good fun, plus the updates that have been coming out during this review process have improved it enough that I expect to see this game get much better as each episode is released. I wouldn’t blame people who want to wait for more or all the episodes to be released, especially given the game’s rough shape at launch. It’s only out on PC at launch but it will be available on PS5 and Xbox in the future.
by Chris Selogy
