It was a sad day when Looking Glass studios closed its doors a few years back after making some of the best games around – the original Thief, and the System Shock games to name a few. But there was hope when people heard that Ion Storm, creators of the fantastic Deus Ex had snapped up the license and were working on a new title in the series.
The sequel to Deus Ex (Invisible War) was, in my opinion, a disappointment. It wasn’t a bad game, but it just wasn’t as good as the original, and had some big flaws. Sadly, this is much the same as Thief III – it isn’t a bad game, but it is a heavily flawed one.
As with previous titles in the series, you play as the thief Garrett, and although there's a new third person view the core gameplay hasn’t changed a lot; essentially you have to steal items of value from heavily guarded medieval establishments without being seen. As with all “true” stealth games, this means the gameplay is generally slow paced, as you search for patterns in the guards’ patrols, and find a way past unnoticed.
The story in Thief is excellent, and really draws you in; this is one of the better parts of the game, and why many of you will want to finish it. As such, I don’t want to spoil any of it for you, because if you are able to overlook the other flaws in the game, you will definitely enjoy it.
Graphically the game is very inconsistent. On one hand it has fantastic shadowing, and good lighting, with shadows being projected from all around. However, since this is all running on the Xbox and not the high-end PC the game engine was designed for, the game has some horrific v-sync issues (which is sadly becoming much more common with Xbox titles) and a dreadful framerate – there are places where you will have seen faster slideshows. From a distance, characters look nice and detailed due to a technique called normal mapping used on them (a form of bump mapping) but the problem with this is that once you get close to them this illusion of detail the technique creates is shattered, and they look terribly low-poly, and badly textured.
At times the AI in the game is very good, and quite convincing; they actually take note of pools of blood on the ground, notice opened doors, or missing items, but as with most aspects of the game, there are big problems here too. Knocking out a guard usually involves them groaning and their sword clanging on the ground, but the other guards in the area take no notice of it (even if they were right in front of the guard, just as long as they don’t see the body) another problem is that after blinding someone with a flashbomb, if you so much as touch them, they can magically see again instantly, and will start attacking you. It isn’t realistic, it isn’t fun, and it gets very annoying. You are also able to sneak up and knock out a foe in a single blow to the back of the head, providing they haven’t seen or heard you. If they have, it takes several blows to either knock them out or kill them – something else that detracts from the experience.
Sound is certainly one aspect of the game that Thief doesn’t fall short in, however. The positioning is excellent, you get a great sense of where every sound is coming from, and the sound quality itself is very good too. Voice acting is also done quite well. I’ve heard better, but it could have been done much worse.
It really is a shame Thief: Deadly Shadows ended up as it did; when everything works as it should in Thief, it’s fantastic, and is a highly enjoyable experience. It has a great atmosphere and story, but it just has too many problems for me to recommend, at least on the Xbox. If you have a PC capable of playing the game at a decent framerate, it’s worth picking it up, especially as some of the major bugs have already been fixed for it.
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