Thief

I can't believe the score for this game.... I am a old school gamer and played all the Thief(s) games back in the day and work as a game tester. I love the all franchise and thought they made a pretty good looking game and make you feel like a Thief when playing it. The medieval architecture in this dark world look great (Xbox 360) and the sound also give a great atmosphere to the game. The game is kind of free roam if you can accept not to go on roof tops but you now have some free running which in my opinion is a nice touch. Now talking about the loading screen between part of the town in the game, (about 10sec) which is needed to render the well detailed graphics content for each area depending on which graphical engine they decided to use to be able to run on all consoles. It's no big deal if you compare it with a game like "Skyrim" which take between (30-50 sec) to load you in or out of a house, and in towns it was a lot of houses trust me. The great thing in Thief is you can choose to switch off all help (like disabling focus, no kills or knockouts, no alerts, stealth takedowns etc..) and make the game way more challenging. The fact you can plan different ways to do the same mission (roofs, back door, sewers etc...) and having the choice of going silent like a ghost to get to your objective or use a more kill like a ninja approach the choice is yours but remember you are a Thief and should use your skills and not mistaking yourself for a Warrior. Depending how you play the game, you can make more gold by completing challenges for every mission. In addition you get couple of things "swipe" which make you dash quickly from one place to another and something call "focus" to see traps, objets, etc.. and some upgrades for Gareth (eg:wrench to move through vents or razor to remove paintings from frames, etc...) For the Cinematics is personal love or hate relationship but never the less they did a great job on design and had good "cinematic experience". The script is not the best i have to say and very cryptic in a way but you can go through your documents and see a resume of what happened if your lost. Now the cons... Ok Thief is full of bugs (eg: sound superposing, poor A.I sometimes, etc...) but the old Thief games were the same; shame they didn't improve on that but overall this is THIEF, sneak, steal, and complete the mission without being notice. The Pros: The graphic looks great and the new additional updates to the game make it a easier for non hardcore stealth gamer. Overall a great game with decent hours of gaming if you include all side missions.