Every guard you come across in a stealth game is a sort of puzzle. How do I get past this guy without being spotted? Or do I put an arrow through his face? That’s the kind of thing Thief does well, using nice-looking shadows and scenarios with multiple paths to make us think before we steal. Everything else, from a clunky story and flat characters to a frustrating mess of a central map made me wish that this Thief reboot hadn’t bothered trying to connect those scenarios with fiction at all.
As his title would imply, main character Garrett steals pretty much anything that isn’t nailed down, including junk like forks, pens, cups - you name it. His indiscriminate kleptomania makes him seem more like a petty thief than a master, though. And he doesn’t have the charm, either in his flat voice acting or his lame, poorly lip-synced dialogue to make him a loveable Robin Hood rogue rather than some jerk who goes around swiping utensils off innocent people’s tables. He’s also wearing a corset for some reason.
Going for a true stealth playthrough is a game of patience; waiting for the right moment to either slip through a hole in the guards’ patrol pattern undetected or take out targets one at a time. You can’t really simply overpower any enemies unlucky enough to catch a glimpse of you, because melee combat is a dumb and repetitive dance of dodging an enemy’s obvious incoming attack and countering. It’s easy against one enemy, but really tough against two or more, especially when there’s a guard with a crossbow involved. But that’s okay, because a good stealth game does everything it can to convince us to avoid direct confrontation.
Stealth is where Thief works best. It’s tough but fair, and gives you breathing room to avoid detection when you keep to the shadows. The impressive lighting makes it almost believable that sometimes you can get close enough to a guard to steal the boogers from his nose undetected. Their AI isn’t fantastic and will occasionally get stuck on walls, but it’s good enough that guards will notice unconscious or dead bodies and open safes, and they react as I expected them to when lured around with Garrett’s selection of trick arrows. Most of those arrows, though, are extremely limited in where they can be used - particularly the fire, water, and rope arrows that only work on very specific objects like open-flame lights and leaking oil barrels. If the level design were more open more often, those limited uses would have many more possibilities, but with these often-tight corridors they’re one-trick ponies. Because you’re only allowed to use them in specific spots, I never felt clever for using them in a way the developers might not have foreseen.
The swoop ability, where you dash about 15 feet ahead almost invisibly, is what makes Garrett feel like a badass ninja, and one of the best things about Thief. It’s extremely handy for crossing gaps in the shadows where guards would spot you, and for quickly backpedaling out of danger when you round a corner and nearly bump into a guard. But most of his other movements feel clumsy, awkward, and inconsistent. For example, if the level designers didn’t specifically say “Yes, you can climb this,” then you can’t, even if it looks like you should be able to. Even jumping down off a ledge is a pain. Sometimes you can just walk off the edge, other times you have to push a button to drop, and others you can’t drop down at all.
That’s part of what makes moving around the main hub map constantly frustrating. The City, as it’s simply known, is a maze-like jumble of dark, narrow streets and narrow passages over rooftops that mostly look alike. And I hate the way The City’s map is broken up with frequent loading screens, which can last upwards of 20 seconds on Xbox One and PlayStation 4. It makes Thief feel like an old game. Worse, it robs The City of a sense of continuity and makes it hard to get around. Even with the minimap, getting from point A to point B is a huge pain. Especially when the citizens get stuck in an annoying conversation loop.
Some of the campaign missions that follow the bland, supernatural-driven story take you to distinctive locations, like a colorful brothel and a genuinely creepy asylum. But too often the level design is claustrophobic and doesn’t leave much room to maneuver. They do have branching paths, and a handful of interesting puzzles, at least.
In certain scenarios, mostly the side missions, things open up and give you room to decide how you want to get in and out of a building, with options to like going in through the vents, the basement, the roof, or just barging in the front door. You’re rated on each mission by what approach you took and how often you were spotted, so there’s lots of incentive to go back and try different approaches. It’s just a pity that developer Eidos Montreal didn’t realize that this is what Thief should be all of the time, not just intermittently.
Garrett’s Focus power is a bit of a crutch, but a much-appreciated one that cuts out frustrating searches for interactive items in a very dark game. You can buy Focus upgrades to make the already easy lockpick minigame easier, or give you hints about where treasure is stashed, but the only one that really changed the way I played in a negative way was the combat upgrades that let me quickly take down alerted guards. The ability to bash my way through enemies kind of defeats the purpose of a stealth game.
Of course, a really good thing about Thief is that it can scale its difficulty however you want. I found the normal “Thief” difficulty setting to be tough enough for me, but pulling off a master-level heist with autosaves, Focus, and crosshairs disabled without being spotted is going to be worth some serious bragging rights. Because of that, Thief can take about as long as you want it to to complete. My time to beat the campaign and most side missions was about 15 hours, partially as a result of trying to get through the early missions completely undetected (and reloading if I was spotted) before giving up and dropping some bodies. It’d take much longer to stealth it all, and it’d be considerably quicker if you kill everything in your path.
That’s pretty much how you have to look at Thief: as a collection of challenging scenarios. Two of those scenarios can be accessed independently from the challenge menu with a selection of timed goals, complete with leaderboards. You’ll find one additional map is available as DLC.
If you’re a stickler for frame rate, the PC version is the only place you can play Thief at 60 frames per second, as both the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 versions are limited to 30 and occasionally stutter below that - usually during cutscenes, oddly enough. (The Xbox One version is limited to 900p resolution).
However, the mouse-and-keyboard inventory interface doesn’t work well - I couldn’t smoothly scroll through my items with the mouse wheel because some items, like the flash bomb, had to be de-equipped before I could switch. And, in addition to the annoying looping conversations, I kept running into an issue on the PC version in dialogue scenes and while peeking through keyholes that caused black bars to appear on either side of the screen and squish the image horizontally - usually it popped back after exiting that screen, but sometimes it would get stuck and I’d have to exit to the menu and reload my save.
THE VERDICT
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