The Thief series is one of the most respected stealth game series of All-Time, however it has been 10 Years since we last played and everybody’s favorite thief Garrett, but now Thief is here and does it live up to the rest of the series? Absolutely not, it’s a pretty big disappointment.
Story:
The Story for Thief is poorly written and uninteresting. The story begins when Garrett is paired with his former apprentice, Erin, a girl who is #2kool4skool, and surprise they both ended up accepting the same job from their contact Basso. On their way there, Garrett steals Erin’s claw without her noticing (How did he do it? Good question!), because she usually uses it to kill guards when not necessary. They arrive at their job’s location, Baron Northcrest’s manor, and find a ritual taking place. Garrett gets a bad feeling and calls off the job, but Erin disagrees and she ends up falling into the center of the ritual, which was nearing its completion. Erin stops and floats in mid-air as she is surrounded by the ritual’s energy. Garrett, while looking down at the light, has part of the stone that was used for the ritual embedded in his eye which then begins to glow and collapses. After being unconscious for a year, Garrett awakens and learns that the city (By the way, guess what the name of the city is? The City. No I’m not joking.) is being plagued by a disease of unknown origin known as “The Gloom” (Which has the ability to make it always Night time in the city, because you never see the sun once in this game.) and the Baron had put the city in lockdown because of it. So how does Garrett try to find out what happened? By stealing more stuff of course! You know, the story would have probably been a lot better had it just been “Hey Garrett, could you pretty please steal <item> for me” “Sure Thing!” I mean that’d be pretty boring, but it’d be better than the confusing, unentertaining mess of story we got stuck with. Also the Characters for this game are completely forgettable, and Garrett acts more like a low budget Batman rather than a master thief. Garrett also likes to give stupid voice overs while he’s sneaking around, telling you what’s going, just in case you fell asleep during the cutscenes, however you can turn these off, so that’s a good thing, I guess.
Gameplay:
Most of the time you’re sneaking around, which is to be expected, and to be honest the stealth is pretty good, but nothing to boast about. There are two things I liked about the Stealth: The Lighting and the Sound Design. The lighting in Thief is fantastic, and quite possibly some of the best I’ve ever seen, and the sound just works really well too. The Atmosphere is pretty good too, while most events feel scripted, The City does feel alive when you’re sneaking around the place, and the overall world looks pretty nice, but again, nothing to brag about. The level design is also pretty good, although it’s not as good as previous games in the series, and the lockpicking in Thief is fairly good too. If you ever fail at the stealth part of the gameplay, you could always engage you’re enemies in combat, which is kidna difficult, but also kinda fun. On the downside for the gameplay, the Focus Feature is completely useless, the controls are meh, and the AI in Thief is rather horrendous, so bad that I could sometimes walk right in front of guards in the light, and they still wouldn’t notice me.
So basically to sum up my review, you could just get Dishonored, you know.
