A worthy successor to the first Thief games.
User Rating: 8.8 | Thief: Deadly Shadows PC
I am a huge fan of the original Thief games. They rank near the top of my list of all time favorite games. As you can imagine, I was quite excited about Thief 3 coming out and was also very nervous but hopeful. Fortunately, the game turned out a bit better than I expected and was definitely not a disaster like the similarly developed Deus Ex: Invisible War. I have heard many people ask the question, "Is it Thief" and answer with, "That's hard to say". As far as I'm concerned it's definitely Thief. The gameplay is almost the same as the previous games with some tweaks and additional features. The atmosphere is very similar (helped a lot by the return of the voice actor for the main character as well as at least one of the main guard voices). The story also fits perfectly into the Thief world. It continues the story from where we left off and it fills in a lot of detail about Garrett's past and his relationship to the Keepers. The story itself is interesting but nothing to get overly excited about. As a lot of other people have similarly said, one of my big concerns about the game was the reduced level sizes and the introduction of loading zones. While they do detract a bit from the game, the level sizes are not nearly as disappointing as I had expected. With the slow methodical pace of the game (as opposed to a rapid shooter game) the reduced level size isn't very noticeable. None of the missions are divided into more than two zones anyway. The introduction of the city is pretty interesting. It adds a lot of glue to the missions and helps you piece them together. When you begin a mission you have to walk through town to the entrace to the mission and when you complete a mission, you typically have to walk through town back to a rendezvous point. I also liked the introduction of the factions and the ability to perform tasks for them. I do think that they could have extended this idea a lot more than they did, but at least it's something. I also enjoyed the idea that Garrett gains a few new skills and abilities as the game progresses. I am mostly an RPG fan so that's probably why I liked that. The graphics are good. Pretty much what I expected. The environment feels so much like the original games, you feel like you're playing them except they just look better. The shadows are cool especially when a guard is walking around carrying a torch. The performance isn't terribly great though. I just bought a brand new Radeon X800 XT Platinum Edition card and I couldn't run the game at the highest resolution with decent framerates so I dropped it down to 1280x1024 which is acceptable but surprising for such a fast card. Now all that said, the game out of the box has a lot of cosmetic problems to it. The game does have the sense of not being completed or polished and it definitely feels that elements of it have suffered at the hands of XBox requirements. The fonts in the game are ridiculously large. The HUDs are more intrusive than I would like. They also have annoying glows behind them. The highlight color is an obnoxious "atomic blue". And loot glint is the stupidest thing I've ever seen. They've added an additional difficulity level, but removed "Don't kill anyone" from the Expert mode (how I play). The good news is that most of these cosmetic problems can be fixed by modding your game. A lot of settings are stored in .ini files and a number of fans have provided texture packs that fix the highlight color, remove the loot glint or just add better textures. I spent about 3 hours tweaking the game before I really started playing it and I was much happier with it after that. The only thing that's difficult to deal with is that without loot glint, it's more difficult to discern whether or not something is loot or not than the previous Thief games. But, I got used to it after a while. The TTLG forums provide a lot of help for this. 
