In October of last year, we posted about a newly soft-launched game called Armed Heist from developer Sozap. It’s designed to be a mobile-friendly take on bank heist shooters like Payday and featured a number of different types of bite-sized missions that had you generally doing awful things like robbing banks and killing any cops that tried to stop you. Immoral activities aside, the formula was extremely fun and I really liked what I played of that early version of Armed Heist. In the almost year since that initial soft launch, Sozap has updated Armed Heist quite frequently adding in new mission types and new modes and generally tweaking things for the better, and at long last they’re finally finished up and ready to launch the game globally next week on August 16th. This trailer is a bit old but it gives you a good idea of what you’re in store for with Armed Heist.

As you can probably tell, Armed Heist is a free to play game and the monetization is almost exclusively designed around unlocking and upgrading new weapons and gear. In other words it’s a grind, but the core gameplay is so fun it’s just the sort of game I enjoy grinding in and slowly making progress in little bits at a time over months or even years. There’s no energy system to speak of and the core mechanics work really well on the touchscreen. You don’t have to take my word for it though, as if you’re in (or have an iTunes account in) Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines, or Sweden then you can click this link and try it out right now for free. Otherwise there’s just under a week to wait before the rest of the world can try out Armed Heist, and in the meantime you can find some discussion about the soft-launched version in our forums.