Finally, a sequel that vets of the series and newcomers can enjoy.
User Rating: 8 | Thief: Deadly Shadows PC
The Master Thief, Garrett has become a favorite amongst gamers since his inception back in 1998 with Thief: The Dark Project, which has pioneered the stealth genre since then. As a sequel to the critically acclaimed Thief: The Metal Age, which incorporated a well-developed story along with The Dark Project's excellent stealth elements, Deadly Shadows is a welcome addition to the series. Those familiar with the two prior Thief titles might initially be upset at the inclusion of the newly implemented third person view. While this does provide a different take to the game, purists will want nothing more than to play in the first person perspective that has remained in Deadly Shadows. If you have never played a Thief game before, the third person view has more of a Metal Gear Solid or Splinter Cell feel to it. The game is played in first-person view — with a third-person option available — and is divided in discrete missions of different length and increasing difficulty. However, the main goal of the majority of these missions is to remove an object from its current location/owner. You are a thief after all, and that's what your talent is, despite many of the situations you're involved in. With the original Thief creators long out of business, Ion Storm has picked up the franchise and pays many loyalties to this innovative series. To go into detail about the back-story, lore and myth that's found inside the Thief series would be way beyond the scope of this evaluation of the game. Suffice it to say that the Thief series is one of the most comprehensively crafted universes to be found in gaming. The characters, the factions, the myths, the events; it all is brought to a rumbling boil, only leaving you with a comfortable feeling of satisfaction. Everything, even material that's perhaps inconsequential in the big scheme of things, is fleshed out with copious detail. When you pick up a Thief game, you're not just playing a game. You plunge into that universe and become part of the story through the eyes of our anti-hero, Garrett the master thief. The game is set in "The City," an unnamed urban sprawl somewhere in the Middle Ages of a fantastic world. It's a damp and oppressive mass of wood and stone, with tightly packed buildings that create a myriad of alleys, twists and dark passages. Also, as the game goes along, you will have the opportunity to perform small side quests of sorts for both Pagans and Hammerites, in order to improve your status with these factions. The City itself is also home for other people, common citizens and merchants. These people have houses and businesses. Inside them, there's usually loot. You do the math. Breaking into these places can be a nice way to fatten your wallet as you go by from mission to mission. Passersby’s on the street can also be pick pocketed, which will also add to your loot. There's never a dull moment in the City. Three factions dominate the power plays of The City: The nature-loving Pagans, the fanatic and zealous Hammerites and the mysterious and cryptic Keepers. While both Pagans and Hammerites operate freely in public, the Keepers are secretly hidden, guiding events through their prophecies. After his brushes with both Pagans and Hammerites in the two previous games, naturally — if the game's subtitle wasn't any indication to you — this time it's all about the Keepers. Once again our cynical and loveable thief is going to get involved and embroiled into events that will turn out to be much bigger than him. You will always try to avoid direct confrontation and you will always try to escape making contact with the enemy. You are not built to fight or to stand toe-to-toe with more than one enemy at a time. The emphasis is placed on stealth. On accomplishing your objectives without being seen or detected. Get in, remove the loot, and get out. Simple, clean and above all, safe. If you prefer more action-oriented titles, this will not be your cup of tea, trust me. The pace is slow and combat is really something you should strive to avoid, whenever possible. Another point to be noted about enemies is the relatively poor enemy AI. The enemies have their patrol paths and they will not deviate from them unless alarmed or alerted, which makes them very easy to trick and take advantage of. Once you know the paths, it's only a matter of picking the right spot to jump on them or evade them. In addition, when you disarm a guard by striking him three or four times, the AI will go haywire and collide into a wall and "run in place" until you finally subdue them. If the enemies acted randomly and had better detection of their environments, the experience in defeating them would be much more rewarding. To aid you through the game, you count with a relatively small variety of weapons and tools at your disposal. On the weapons side of things, you only have three. There's the Blackjack, a rotund type of garrote, which does little damage in combat, but is the weapon of choice to knock the lights out of unsuspecting enemies and render them unconscious. You also have a small dagger, which will be your main defensive weapon in close combat and can also be used to backstab a distracted enemy (or citizen). Finally, you have a bow and a variety of arrows, which serve different purposes. Of course, you can fire broadhead arrows when you're just going for the silent, ranged kill. A well-placed headshot with one of these will instantly kill most enemies. You can also shoot water-tipped arrows, useful to put out torches, candles and chandeliers at a distance in order to remove the illumination of the area you're about to progress into. There are also moss-tipped arrows, which will soften the sound you make while walking over it; fire-tipped arrows that explode on contact can take out most enemies in one shot. Also in your arsenal are Gas-tipped arrows, filled with sleeping gas. To complete the well-equipped thief look, you have noisemaker arrows. Fire them to a distant clearing past the guards and they will make a racket, attracting the attention of the guards towards the spot, and away from the area they were guarding. As far as your tools, you carry a lock picking set, and a variety of items including oil flasks, health potions, flashbombs, gas bombs, holy water (this desecrates the undead), and exploding mines. To complete the equipment you can acquire a pair of climbing gloves, which will enable you to climb up and down any vertical surface made of wood or stone. They're invaluable to reach that window. However, the climbing gloves are no match for the Deadly Shadows' predecessors Rope Arrows, which is pretty self-explanatory. The City itself, where you will spend most of your time when you're traveling from mission to mission, simply has a very nice aesthetic appeal, but lacks quite a bit of intricate detail. Medieval architecture dominates the City in the shape of massive stone and wood constructions over cobbled stone streets. Torches and a few lamps provide the illumination, creating a somewhat misty, dirty and eerie mood. To top things off, the City is starting to see the first signs of industry creeping in, it's in the form of piping and metal conspicuously placed. The dynamic lighting is a determining factor between a dead guard and a dead Garrett. You will be able to see if your head is receiving any torchlight when you're settled behind and a crate, if this is the case, prepare to un-sheath you dagger. Unfortunately, Thief: Deadly Shadows' shortcomings are so bright that even the Master Thief himself cannot escape the light. The City's areas are simply too small and you can't help but feel claustrophobic. You'll only be walking through two or three streets in each quarter. As the game progresses and you're forced to backtrack your way across the City, the result becomes irritating. To move between the City's quarters you have to traverse through loading zones, which means elongated loading times. The areas are so small you can travel through one of them in way less than a minute, if you know where you are going. The constant loading points due to this definitely detract from the experience. The game looks very good. Naturally, there's been some care put towards making them work. However, they do so at great expense. The overall performance is on the lacking side more often than not. All that terrific dynamic shadow effects come at a price. Even on high-end systems, frame rates average between 30 and 40 fps, which is low considering the graphics are by no means gorgeous. It doesn't stop there unfortunately. Some areas (usually congested) can have an fps that sky rockets to 70-80. Other environments, which heavily depend on a bountiful amount of real-time lighting, can sink to 20 fps. The frame rate is not consistent. The game's cutscenes are a mixed bag. Some of them are of an astoundingly high visual quality, reminiscent of a masterfully detailed, hand-painted look. The introductions to the main Pagan and Hammerite missions are examples of these. However, for some reason, most of the other cutscenes seem to be crudely done, with blocky polygonal characters and blurry textures. The player might feel at a loss to why Ion Storm couldn't choose one style of cutscene and stick with it throughout the game. The sound is definitely one of the high points of the game. First, the music is very subtle most of the time and finds its way to a prominent position without you getting beat on the head with it. It serves as a dark and brooding backdrop for your thieving capers. But it's the ambient sounds themselves that are fantastic. Stephen Russell, the perennial voice of Garrett, deserves obligatory praise for his brilliant voice acting. In this day and age where voice acting is more often than not overlooked or given little consideration, it's a pleasure to hear in this game. Not only are the main story characters well acted, but almost every other character in the game have good scripts as well. From drunken guards to snotty landlords, passing through the warped mystic voices of the Keeper monks, the casual conversational tone of citizens passing each other on the streets and the fanatic Hammerites reciting holy passages. They all add to the believability of the City as a living environment. The physics in general do not seem to be simulated very well. Removing a candlestick from the top of a pile of boxes, for example, will cause the whole pile to tremble and shuffle, as if the boxes were made out of sponge. On a couple of occasions as well, picking up something from a table causes the table to briefly lift itself upwards after removing the weight of the object, as if the table was filled with helium. Of course, these seemingly light and objects are completely unable to be pushed by your character, which may leave some players stultified. Surprisingly, the game takes a good 20-30 to complete. However, it takes the entire first half of the game for the fun to really kick in to high gear. Ion Storm has redeemed themselves after their release of the disappointing sequel, Deus Ex: Invisible War. Though, a player might wonder what could have happened to Thief: Deadly Shadows if Ion Storm had took the time out to fix the goofy physics and odd AI reactions. Either way, there is much fun to be had for both Thief veterans and new comers to the series. 
