![]() When placed alongside the new ground broken by games like Far Cry 3, Mark of the Ninja, Gunpoint and Dishonored, Thief feels rigid, dull, and largely devoid of complexity or opportunities to improvise. It's up to the player to decide how to poke and prod at the machine, or whether to slip through the gears so expertly that the mechanism never even registers an outside presence. The stealthy player exists at the periphery, and without his or her interference, the machine simply continues to spin and grind. Immersive sims like the original Thief games have historically consisted of complex levels that, at their best, operate like great whirring mechanisms. Exploring The City often feels like attempting to navigate a wheelchair to the top of a great stack of differently-sized crates. Thief's map is a perverse achievement in counter-intuitive video-game cartography, a series of white lines and black squares so starkly unhelpful that it sometimes feels malevolent. As the hours pass, Thief becomes a claustrophobic, constipated experience, a collection of coffins glued together into a superstructure that's all the more difficult to navigate for its blown-out size.Ī moment to recognize the awfulness of the in-game map. While it's usually possible to go back through the door or window that just closed, all that endless, unceremonious shutting leaves the game feeling unpleasantly fragmented. It's a subtle thing, but constant, and it has a distressing effect over time. Thief is a series of gates, each one spring-loaded to close as quickly as possible. When he finds a secret passageway or unscrews a gate leading to a ventilation duct, the openings swing shut as he passes through. ![]() When Garrett goes through a window, the window automatically closes behind him. ![]() At almost every opportunity, the game closes itself behind you, sealing off Garrett's path of escape and pushing him ever forward. For example, you can begin to jimmy open a window and guards will immediately stop chasing you, even if they were right on your heels. It's constantly patrolled by dangerous guards, but if they spot you, whatever chase ensues will likely be brief, ending either with Garrett cornered or with the player taking advantage of one of several ridiculous ways to exploit enemies' shonky artificial intelligence. The City has more dead-ends than it has escape routes. In particular, the rope-attached arrows that allowed for such creative exploration in past Thief games now can only be attached to a scant handful of designated rope-points. His bow and arrow theoretically offer some means of manipulating the environment, but even that has been hobbled when compared with past games. ( Thief has so, so many loading screens.) It's all fragmented and immensely difficult to navigate-Garrett can climb some walls but not others, scale some fences but not others, open some doors but not others. Story missions and sidequests are all isolated, and each one is separated from The City's streets by at least one loading screen. What initially looked free and open is revealed to be locked in irons, little more than a collection of cramped corridors stacked on top of one another and placed between you and your next objective. The City is obstinate and confusingly designed, and its sprawl is mostly an illusion. It's a malignant growth of houses built up on other houses, a busted Rubik's Cube of angled alleyways and dark, hidden corners.Īn eager player might be champing at the bit to start exploring, but reality is far less exciting than it may have seemed at first blush. This place appears fascinating at first glance. There is perhaps no better encapsulation of Thief than its setting, a perpetually nocturnal steampunk mega-shantytown known as The City. Like those forebears, Thief is a first-person adventure game that casts you in the role of a larcenous leather-wearer named Garrett, a legendary thief who prefers to stick to the shadows, grab the loot, and avoid being seen whenever possible. Its predecessors, particularly 1998's Thief: The Dark Project and 2000's Thief II: The Metal Age, are often credited with revolutionizing if not flat-out inventing a particular genre of immersive stealth game. Thief is the long-awaited fourth entry in the storied Thief series. ![]() It's a game that could have been great and is instead a lumpy, frumpy disappointment, outclassed on all sides by its contemporaries and struggling mightily for a foothold in a world that's moved on to better things. It's hard to know quite where to begin with a shambling mediocrity such as this. A city full of closed doors and dead ends, boxed in and lined with nothing but rough edges: That's Thief.
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