We study the failure mode transition of steel plates under impact loading. For low impact velocities, brittle crack growths is observed while shear bands occur when the speed of the impactor is increased. Meshfree Galerkin method is employed to simulate the failure mode transition behavior. We use Johnson-Cook model for the steel. The cracks and shear bands are treated as strong discontinuities. This equal representation of the kinematics of the crack and shear bands allows for a consistent and effective modelling of these complicated events. Previous models generally used complex constitutive models for shear band modeling included fluid like behavior when the stress collapses. We demonstrate for the well-known Kalthoff problem the efficiency of our method.