The Heist

The Good
In this game, you play a cat burglar, who has the job of stealing valuable paintings from a building without coming in contact with security systems, pits, and sentry droids that move back and forth along a platform. If you fall into a pit, you'll fall to your death and lose a life. If you touch a droid or a security system, you'll be electrocuted, fall to your death, and lose a life. You have three lives, but once all of them have expired, the game is over. You also have a time limit of two minutes to collect one painting, and if you collect one, the timer resets. When the timer reaches zero, you also lose a life. Once you have gotten all the paintings, you move on to the next level, which, as far as I know, can be more difficult than the last one.

There are three floors in the building, and you travel to each one by using either elevators or escalators. When you travel via elevator, you don't just stand in front of it and wait, but you actually have to press which floor you wish to travel to. (ie: use the keyboard to press 1, 2, or 3.) There are also locked doors that will eventually lead to more paintings. These doors can be only opened by using keys (duh).

Part of the challenge in this game is knowing when and where to open certain doors without running out of keys. My suggestion is to try to find as many keys as you can before attempting to open any doors, just to reach other paintings. Although the cat burglar can jump over certain kinds of enemies, you can get as close to them as possible, but it's knowing when to jump that is the problem.

The graphics and sounds are nothing special. There are at least four different sounds, and they can be heard when you come across situations like traveling up or down an escalator, riding an elevator to whatever floor, and collecting a painting. The graphics are average as well. The cat burglar himself doesn't look so bad, although before I played this game, I expected that he would have been wearing a black-and-white uniform on, rather than just a pink cap and t-shirt, as well as blue jeans.

The Bad
Nothing.

The Bottom Line
Just one of those simple games of the early eighties, which I intend to enjoy very much. I don't think that this game is the subject of copyright, because as far as I know, Micro Fun was defunct years ago.

Rating: ***