Technically, Heist plays from a third person isometric view. The player interacts with onscreen personae via the mouse using standard RTS conventions to control item use and weapons. Throughout the game you can hire individual members onto your crew (usually through some sort of quest) and they augment your team by being varied in abilities. Each member comes with skills in Weapons, Electronics, Lock Picking, Health and Speed. Obviously a Hacker type character will be inferior to the Veteran character when it comes to weapons and vice versa when it comes to defeating exotic security gadgetry like thermal cameras or security alarm systems. The graphics, being none too extraordinary, is able to render pedestrians, cars and many buildings. At night, there is a pleasant lighting effect from cars and structures. As this game is about robberies, your primary concern will probably be with the buildings of which include things like drug stores, electronics stores, casinos and of course banks. Each building comes with a different security value assigned to them, so it is expected that a supermarket will be a lot less heavily guarded than a bank. Entering buildings presents a dialog box that tells you what you can do there. Sometimes, depending on the building, you can buy things but most of the time you will be trying to scope out the place for possible security measures.

The actual robbery takes place as follows. Targeted buildings can be protected by a combination of the following: personnel, security devices, locks, vaults and finally you will have to account for loading time. Specific character attributes noted above correspond to the various measures. The Hacker would be a lot more useful on security devices and locks while the Assassin or Veteran will be effective in subduing personnel. Even the time of the day you scope out a particular building affects the security present. Each time a person scopes a place, it inevitably raises suspicion. The developers have created a suspicion meter and another meter to indicate how long your characters are taking to assess the targeted building. Again, a gun-toting member of your crew will have a much tougher time in assessing buildings quick enough before being kicked out by the security. After you scope a place out, performing the heist works on a similar notion in that an alarm and heist meter begin to count down. If the alarm meter counts down before the heist meter, the alarm will ring and the police will be called to the scene. Luckily, when you perform the actual heist, you can move in your less than stealthy characters to help with subduing personnel or hauling out the loot.

Unfortunately, that is effectively how all robberies will be carried out on every single building. If you're thinking of performing near-impossible heists like in the movie Entrapment, you're going to be in for a letdown. On the one hand, there are a lot of cameras and other security measures to prevent you from robbing a certain place. However, with a solid crew member equipped with countermeasures like an IR goggle for the IR camera, these can be subdued. Even with all the gadgets in the world, you only serve to make the heist meter count down faster than the alarm meter; not very exciting so to speak. You definitely will not have the opportunity to hack codes, rig little keypads, and snatch other people's passwords like in the movies either.

Heist is wrapped around a storyline involving mafia wiseguy Jimmy "The Gent" Conway, whose practise of robbery is a sideshow to his more 'official' mafia business. Conway gets himself in jail and is freed by an unknown boss. Thus, from then on, you're somehow indebted to this person and have to perform his bidding; usually trying to muck up other criminals' lives. Each mission brings you to a new city locale with a wide variety of side quests that you can pick up in bars or motels to get you in contact with the right people so you can retrieve whatever you're looking for. Sometimes the missions are simply to steal something. At other times you are ordered to rescue people (which are effectively the same as regular robberies except the prize is the person instead of the loot) or destroy things (cars and people included). Each locale is a living and breathing city with cars driving around, although sometimes in a repetitive, moronic fashion. Most of them are small enough that you can run from one place to another. Naturally, drawing a gun or robbing a store unsuccessfully will attract 'heat', while running to an isolated area or going into a safe house will normalize 'heat' so you can throw the yoke of the police off again. If you can't stock up before the mission, usually there are shops (gun shops in particular) to help you out or you can simply rob those stores without paying for the merchandise. These are more like voluntary quests, although by the end of the game, you'll have more than enough money to forego wanton robberies altogether.

The planning part comes when you have to note police patrols that run in fixed patterns, assess your target location, get enough countermeasures to overwhelm the place and secure an escape route (i.e. just anywhere without the police). If you make off with a successful heist though, usually there is no need to plan a dramatic getaway. Often, there are other criminal factions in the game world with you; including bikers, drug lords and the usual mix of unfriendly bunches. Here you'll have to engage in some firefights (or run to the police). Firefights are as easy as clicking on your target. Ammo is unlimited so there is no need to spend money to maintain your cache of weapons. This reminded me of Postal and there is no unlimited supply of law enforcement so the sadistic among you can perform mass genocide without anyone stopping you. Since this is an isometric game, a lot of the tricks from previous games continue to work. For example, in a well-placed ambush, you can still trap people behind terrain obstructions while having a clear line of sight; easily finishing off a whole slew of police. In my experience, I found when the fighting starts, it's simply better to group all your characters into a bunch and fire at will, since enemies will die faster (and have less chance to return fire) in this manner. Enemies in motion are harder to click on and constantly agitate the on-screen characters. A few times my character would somehow end up outside of the map and be unable to come back into the main playing area. Still stranger is when I killed a police officer who has no health and keels over but miraculously gets back up, yet I'm unable to target them again.

Aurally, this game is decent but it has no spectacular feature to recommend it. There is a considerable amount of voiceovers but they become monotonous soon after, especially the movement acknowledgement speech. Compounded to this is the non-affable protagonist of the story whose wiseguy accent is a bit forced. Moreover, any significant portions of dialog, especially those within a building, bring up a dialog box that has to be read to the end before it can be closed with the customary "X" at the top right corner. Sometimes the focus for this box is lost and you have to click around until you activate the dialog box before you can proceed again. Other times, I entered a building that I was not supposed to rob but because I could click the heist icons under the dialog box (I am pretty sure it's supposed to disabled as a big "PAUSED" sign covers some of the box), I performed a heist despite the fact that the security guy said I was not welcome in that building. Furthermore, the objectives within the multi-faceted missions are sometimes unclear as well. Despite the fact that you have two sources of information on your objectives, there are still some places where you have to find a person but if you weren't paying attention to the conversations, you could easily be lost and unable to complete the mission (plus there is a lack of in-game saves). Perhaps the most irate feature is when you press the escape key, the game believes you want to automatically abort the mission without warning. It is rather ironic that a game with dialog boxes that won't go away, that the developers didn't find time to put one to warn you if you're aborting the game.

In the beginning of this review, I described the process to perform a heist verbatim, like a manual, only because I wanted to illustrate just how anticlimactic the developers made the bread and butter of their game. It plays more like a papers, rocks, scissors game; good crew and expensive countermeasures can overcome sneaky security. Watching two bar graphs go down is not exactly what I was expecting. Certainly, the developers were going for the tension or adrenaline that one gets watching the movies but this didn't work for me. When I started this game, I thought with its emphasis on assembling a crew and the planning involved, it would be like a game reincarnation of the excellent film "Heat". One of the reasons why this game is inherently deceiving is because its shell art is so reminiscent of movies like a turbocharged "Gone in 60 Seconds". It looks like a fast action-paced robbery game and failing that, perhaps a game about the intricacies of performing impossible heists (a la Thief). Sadly, that isn't the case here. The only redeeming features are the artwork and gameplay, which brings this title up to a passing grade, but without those, the only heist that's happening here is for those bills from your wallet.