After 10 years in the shadows, the Thief series has finally reemerged causing fans of the original games to rejoice. However, this reboot unfortunately squanders all of its potential with a myriad of issues ranging from its gameplay to its presentation. Thief is frustrating primarily because underneath all of these issues is the foundation for a fantastic stealth action game, yet the vast number of problems that plague it make it hard to recommend for even the most die-hard Thief fans. That’s the hardest pill to swallow: that Thief could have been great. Instead, what it does to separate itself from other stealth action games is mostly negative.
Once again, you assume the role of master thief Garrett who stalks the rooftops and shadows of The City looking for riches and other mysterious objects. The game’s story begins with Garrett and his protégé Erin running and leaping across these rooftops and shadows as they seek a mysterious treasure they’ve been hired to collect. Things don’t go according to plan, and Garrett wakes up a year later looking to find both Erin (who has since gone missing) and answers to what happened that night. What happens from there in terms of the story falls completely flat. It doesn’t take long for the story to devolve into a ridiculous and incoherent tale, and it consistently fails to answer the many questions it brings up throughout its duration. Even worse is that the game chooses to make this story the centerpiece of its gameplay. The true star of Thief’s gameplay is The City itself. It’s a dark, brooding and perfectly atmospheric world, filled with shadows, dark alleyways and slummy underpasses, and unfortunately, the story distracts you and prevents you from fully immersing yourself in it. Cutscenes constantly interrupt your exploration and movement to bring you minor or irrelevant details regarding the weak story. Thief places its focus in presenting a more cinematic and streamlined story, choosing to spoon feed you details every few moments rather than letting you seek them out for yourself. As a result, the core gameplay suffers as you’re constantly interrupted.
“Thief places its focus in presenting a more cinematic and streamlined story, choosing to spoon feed you details every few moments rather than letting you seek them out for yourself”
It’s not just the story that prevents you from fully enjoying all the hidden secrets The City has to offer. The gameplay itself can be restrictively linear as it prevents you from immersing yourself in the game’s dark world. It consistently forces you down narrow hallways and limits the variety of paths you can take to reach your goal, and there are even moments the game forces you into action you may be hesitant to take. Instead of giving you the freedom to explore, sneak and attack (or avoid) enemies as you please, the game forces you to play the way it wants you to play instead of letting you figure out what works best. The City isn’t an open world so much as it is a series of segmented areas separated by numerous loading screens and “Mission Complete” screens. Thief may make you think it’s an open world game waiting to be explored, but its linear mission structure makes it feel more like a series of semi-related missions tied together by a weak story.
Thief’s core gameplay also has a few quirks of its own that prevent it from being more than a competent stealth action game. For one, the movement is clunky and restricted, which makes Garrett’s movements choppy and disjointed rather than smooth and fluid. The game’s controls aren’t always responsive and it makes the game frustrating when they fail to cooperate after carefully planning your route. That’s rarely a consistent issue though, as the brain-dead AI is usually very forgiving. If you happen to be caught, you can give enemy soldiers the slip simply by sprinting around a corner and crouching in a shadowy area. Enemy soldiers refuse to search beyond wide open areas and aren’t very attentive when you’re hiding right under their nose. They’ll also give up searching for you and act as though nothing happened, making it far too easy to start a section over again without having to load a previous save. For a game that emphasizes stealth and sticking to the shadows, Thief rarely punishes you for doing the opposite.
One of the things that impressed me the most with Thief, however, was the overall aesthetic. The art direction is fantastic, and all the sections of The City have a distinct, yet gloomy, look and feel. Technically though, Thief doesn’t impress. It has some good lighting and weather effects, but some of the textures are flat out ugly. Couple this with some weird clipping and some odd texture pop in, and you have a game that has a great look and feel, but looks dated. The sound follows in the visuals’ footsteps. The music does a wonderful job of accentuating the action and tension of the stealth gameplay, and it makes some moments more exciting. There is an issue, however, with the sound levels of the game. For example, dialog audio in cutscenes can be virtually silent, yet ambient dialog as you traverse through The City is so loud, it’ll make you jump. Also, there are a myriad of audio hiccups throughout the game. Different lines of dialog will overlap one another making it impossible to make out exactly what people are saying. Most of this dialog is ambient, so it isn’t totally crucial, but this is another instance of Thief’s inconsistencies breaking your immersion from its potentially great world.
In the end, Thief may be a competent stealth-action game, but that’s about all it is. The game’s great art design brings you a dark, atmospheric world you want to explore. It’s a shame it wasn’t fleshed out more by way of a more open world, more opportunities for exploration or a coherent story. The gameplay itself may be unremarkable and has a variety of issues from AI to mission structure, but the foundation for a great game is there. Hopefully, if given another chance, Eidos can deliver instead of disappointing.
The Verdict
6.1