I’m not sure if anyone asked for this, but Repchik is back. In the previous game, Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion , he evaded taxes and was forced to become the mayor’s assistant to pay off his debt. In the sequel with the less funny title Turnip Boy Robs a Bank, Repchik commits a much more terrible crime – bank robbery. The plot has changed, the genre is now also different, but the protagonist remains just as charming, and the situations in which he finds himself are no less funny – there is more than enough good humor here. Play
Repeat offender
What happens in the sequel is closely related to the ending of the last game, but I will do without spoilers. A day after the events of the first part, a civil war began in the city, and Repchik finds himself recruited by the head of the mafia, because he committed “the bravest act in the world” – he evaded paying taxes. The mafioso has one task – to rob the Botanical Bank, where all the residents hid after the start of the war. Repchik will do the dirty work, and his employer will remain in a safe place where he will give orders.
When we first get to the bank, a timer appears in the corner of the screen – in three minutes we need to collect as much money as possible, after which we return to the car and automatically save ourselves by delivering our earnings to the shelter. You can approach mere mortals and literally shake money out of them, you can break windows and take jewelry, you can break furniture and all sorts of machines – there is money there too. However, it quickly turns out that the authors did not stray too far from the formula of the previous game – there are characters who give out side quests, and there are plenty of enemies, including bosses. It’s just that now this is not an adventure in the spirit of two-dimensional Zeldas, but a roguelike with short runs, in which you start the passage in the same place.
One of the main complaints about Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion was related to the combat system – you had to fight often, and there were a lot of inconveniences in fights. In the sequel, this problem was solved by adding firearms – there are pistols, machine guns, and shotguns. There are a lot of exotic types of weapons: a can of construction foam, a submachine gun that shoots money, all sorts of analogues of flamethrowers, there are even grenade launchers. They haven’t forgotten about close combat – there are bats, something like spears, and even a huge sword with which it is impossible to miss. All this falls out of defeated opponents, and you can not only use the taken gun within one run, but also take the found weapon to the shelter and hand it over to the local pawn shop. Each discovery increases the level of the weapons store and allows you to permanently unlock new “toys”, including a crossbow and a blaster.
This is not the only progression system – a separate store sells numerous upgrades, on which you spend the money you find in the bank. In addition to the banal increase in health and damage, here, for example, you can buy an upgrade with which, when wounded, the character will splash milk – opponents die from contact with it. The most useful improvements are related to increasing Repchik’s money bag (you can carry a limited amount), as well as adding seconds to the timer (the maximum possible time is 6 minutes).
Turnip Boy Robs a Bank differs from many other bagels in that the map here is almost never randomly generated. All main locations of the bank, including the foyer, sewers, huge area, and so on, remain unchanged. Plot and secondary characters always stand in the same places, doors do not move or disappear – if you need to get somewhere, you can always quickly get to the right place, and you don’t even need a map for this.
The only difference is the bonus rooms, which are not necessary for completing the story – they change places in each race. In one you will come across cultists, in another you will meet a DJ who asks you to collect the souls of enemies using a scythe, in the third you will meet a scientist conducting experiments on animals. Although the rewards for completing tasks are hats and other unnecessary rubbish, the entertainment is still quite entertaining.
This feature was carried over here from the last game – what kind of “side effects” were there, there were no significant rewards, what is not here, but you still want to go through them for the sake of funny dialogues. And in any case, many tasks require you to find/buy this or that item, or talk to someone and give something, so you complete many of them by chance, talking to characters who have icons above their heads.
Then you meet a woman whose husband ran away with divorce papers, and you need to shake them out of him. Either you’re talking to a fan of a streamer trying to get attention, or to a scientist who needs the blessing of some sage before he gets to work. Some of the jokes refer to the first game – after all, we meet many characters from there in the sequel. But even if you haven’t completed the last part, you will probably laugh at the dialogues here more than once.
The game has been translated into fewer languages than the first part, and there is no Russian translation here. But judging by the responses from the developers, there is hope for other languages to appear in the future.
Got rid of shortcomings
Another difference from other roguelights is their short duration. You can complete the game in five hours, after which there is no need to return to it – this is not Hades with a bunch of endings. Moreover, if I criticized the first part for its timing, here it is perfect, because just closer to the end the gameplay begins to get a little boring. But until this moment there is no time to be bored: new regions open, doors are unlocked, allowing you to quickly move from the foyer to other locations, and so on. This is very convenient for farming money: if in the first hour you don’t pass by the statues, for the destruction of which they give you as much as a thousand dollars, then in the second half of the game you don’t go into the room with them at all – jewelry worth a hundred times more is just as easy to get.
Even the three-minute timer is not as annoying as one might think. In fact, there is no need to immediately run to the exit if there are already two and a half minutes on the screen – when the time runs out, the alarm will simply turn on and opponents will begin to appear in the rooms. These are the same enemies that you meet during exploration, and their number is not that great. So you can run for a couple more minutes – you just need to take care of your health. But if you start to get greedy and still don’t run to the car, the owner of the bank will release poisonous gas, and you won’t be able to escape from it – it quickly takes away your health. When Repchik dies, he receives only half of the collected money and loses all the jewelry he found, and they are the main source of large earnings.
Everything seems great – you run around the bank, read funny dialogues and enjoy the game. And then a very strange final episode begins. Throughout the game you need to defeat four main bosses – dangerous opponents with several phases. In the finale, for some reason you are forced to run all over the map and fight them again, and the conditions do not change – they are just the same battles with the same rules.
When you win again, the final boss appears… but you don’t need to fight him – he just flies around and gets in the way. The player is required to visit the boss rooms again and pick up plot items from there, only the world map at this moment changes completely. Most of the familiar exits are blocked, more obstacles appear, the enemies haven’t disappeared anywhere, and the boss doesn’t stop throwing projectiles.
If you die in this episode, the whole process needs to start over again: run around the entire map, look for bosses, defeat them, and then run around their rooms again. With some attempt it is possible to do this, but this is a case when it would be better if there was no ending at all – this episode is so meaningless, which seems to have been created in a hurry. It doesn’t completely ruin the experience of the game, but I wouldn’t be surprised if some players give up after the first try – not because it’s difficult or impossible, but because it’s not worth the time.
Repchik’s return turned out to be successful – Turnip Boy Robs a Bank does not catch the eye with the title as much as the last game, but the sequel turned out to be no less wonderful in terms of gameplay. The change of genre benefited the project, and the addition of firearms corrected one of the main problems of its predecessor. It’s a pity that the ending turned out to be blurry – perhaps in the third game the developers themselves will laugh about it in one of the dialogues.
- Design