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Thief: Deadly Shadows
Developer: Ion Storm Publisher: Eidos
Reviewed by (Irony) on 07/30/04
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First Impressions:
As a devotee of the first two games in the Thief series, I was looking to get my hands on Thief: Deadly Shadows (the third and likely final entry in the series) long before it went gold. I replayed the other games in anticipation, and tried to brush off nagging concerns that this game was going to be a dismal console port like its Ion Storm-released cousin, the dreadfully disappointing Deus Ex: Invisible War. Why was I afraid? Because this was the first Thief game to be released simultaneously on X-Box and PC (this review is of the PC version; I am poor and do not own an X-Box, sorry to say), and when it comes to simultaneous console/PC releases, it’s usually the PC version that gets the shaft (witness the aforementioned DE:IW).
If other reviews are to be believed, my experience with the game was not out of the ordinary. It ran well right out of the box, with only the occasional crash that was usually my fault for trying to do two computer things at once (like get some screenshots for this review). The X-Box version of the game is scoring lower than the PC version in other reviews, which could mean several things, but the one thing it couldn’t mean is that Thief: Deadly Shadows is a bad port. As you can see from my overall rating, it’s not. The question then becomes, is it a worthy end to this trilogy? That answer is, in my mind, “kinda.”
If you haven’t played the first two Thief games, and are taking this opportunity to dive into the franchise, I’d counsel you not to do it. Yes, I’d recommend Thief: Deadly Shadows to any FPS fan, but trust me when I say that the game experience will be much better when you take the trilogy as a whole. I also can’t say that T:DS is my favorite of the series, and can’t say I enjoyed playing it even as much as the oft-maligned Thief 2: The Metal Age. The story of the Thief universe is rich and intriguing, and T:DS does not make much of an attempt to bring new players up to speed (a fact I appreciated, as I didn’t have to suffer through a lot of exposition). Yes, you can play the game without knowing the history or background story, but the experience will be the poorer for it.
If you, like me, played the series and gloried in the thieviness of it all, relishing a game that let you embody a wily character in a unique universe that required street smarts and savvy for sheer survival, then you might be asking different questions. Does the game suffer for being a simultaneous console release? Do you miss equipment like rope arrows? Does playing in third-person enhance or detract from the experience? Is Garrett still extremely cool?
Reviews are subjective, so I can’t answer those questions except to describe my experience, let you know where I’m coming from as a fan of the series, and toss in a giant grain of salt. With that said, I think the game does suffer from being a simultaneous console release. Certain concessions were made to X-Box users that are reflected in the PC version, and I think that those concessions result in a game that is different enough from its two predecessors to feel like a distant relation rather than a continuation. Yes, I understand that consoles are where the money lies. I’m not placing blame, just stating an opinion: console games have certain characteristics that, when applied to games played on the PC, are limiting, and represent some serious steps backwards in nearly every sense. Some games, like Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, overcome those elements easily by shifting focus. Some games, like Deus Ex: Invisible War and, in my mind, Thief: Deadly Shadows, suffer. That suffering is multiplied ten-fold when, like these two games, they have PC-only predecessors to which we can compare them. I’ll get into this more in Game Play, below.
The game’s story continues the rich tradition of Garrett cracking wise as he plies his thieving trade throughout a city that’s a combination of medieval trappings and industrial age technology. Earlier in the series, we learn that the city is manipulated by groups with varying agendas. These include the Hammers, a religiously strict cadre who worship the Builder and preach righteousness and stability; the Pagans, with their woodsy magic, blood magic, and hatred of all that isn’t green and growing; and the Keepers, mysterious “watchers” with a strict policy of non-intervention, which means, of course, that they intervene all the time. The player embodies Garrett, a former urchin pick-pocket who was trained by the Keepers, but left them behind to use his skills in a more lucrative manner.
In Thief: The Dark Project, the first in the series, Garrett learns the hard way that Pagans are trouble, and ancient religious relics are more aggravation than they’re worth (in gold). In Thief 2: The Metal Age, Garrett foils the plans of the Mechanists, an offshoot of the devout Hammers. It only makes sense, then, that Thief: Deadly Shadows would teach us more about the Keepers, and Garrett’s role in history-shaping prophecy.
Graphics:
Compared to the first two games in the series, Thief: Deadly Shadows has above-average graphics, in “technology” terms. What this means is that the people look more realistic: Garrett’s body is fully modeled so that you can look down and see your own arm (something many first-person shooters lack), so you have a better sense of your place in the game world, and the physics allow for much more realistic body-flopping and motion. Also, T:DS has something the other games didn’t have: the ability to switch from first-person to third-person on the fly. Neither perspective is required, and I found myself sticking mostly to first-person because I was more comfortable with it. Other players enjoyed third-person for the entirety of the game, and it certainly made some things easier, like looking around corners, or seeing where you were when climbing a wall. Also, Garrett himself now has a softly glowing outline, even when in deep shadow, so you can always tell where you are. A welcome addition was the “loot glint,” a small shimmer around valuable property. Given that, in the first two games, you spent a lot of time picking up and discarding useless goblets looking for the one bejeweled object, this saved me some aggravation.
In terms of art direction, Thief: Deadly Shadows is a poor imitation of its predecessors. Let’s talk about the city, first of all. Previous Thief games gave us some missions inside the city, notably some tracking levels, where you follow an antagonist through the city streets, and the deservedly famous “Thieves Highway” level of Thief 2: The Metal Age, where you prowl the rooftops on your way to a lucrative score. Even one of those levels is larger than the entire city in T:DS. Yes, it was an intriguing idea to make the city a permanent “zone” wherein you buy and sell equipment, interact with fences, and engage in a little petty theft. Due to limitations in the engine, however, and the necessity of compatibility with the X-Box version, the city is a disappointment in nearly every way. Graphically, the buildings are stunted, the textures uninspired, and the disturbingly jarring presence of steam-driven technology is rendered mundane.
Thief: Deadly Shadows has no sense of scale. Standing before a Hammer fort or cathedral, one weeps for what might have been, wishing for the fulfillment of the promise held in the incredibly intricate scenery present in earlier games. Remember the insanity of Constantine’s Mansion? The echoing loneliness of the Lost City? The chill terror of the Haunted Cathedral? I found no level in T:DS worthy of those examples, save one, Shalebridge Cradle, and that level is terrifying not in its scale, but in its claustrophobic intimacy. (Tycho of Penny Arcade, linked below, mentioned switching to third-person in that level simply to alleviate some of the fear and tension.)
Why the city fails so miserably, and the game itself suffers, is that we’ve seen these things before. We’ve seen the rooftops of the city, we’ve looted its banks, we’ve trailed antagonists through its winding cobblestone streets past sparking street lamps, and we’ve even fled Garrett’s apartment with assassins hot on our heels. We’ve gotten to know the city as a place so immense it nearly defies description. We know there are regions outside its walls and beneath its streets, but the city itself is large enough to be Garrett’s whole world; his playground. Now, not only is the city so tiny I found myself covering entire zones in mere seconds, but it is necessarily divided into even smaller zones due to the console development limitations. Artistically, we are playing in the Cliffs Notes version of Garrett’s city, and that was without a doubt the most disappointing aspect of the game. Gone is the color, the wonder of one pane of stained glass, and the mystery of a forest grove.
Also gone are the traditional cut scenes which, like the graphic novel panels used in the Max Payne series, lent a genuine weight and feel to your between-mission prep, and to the story itself. While some rendered scenes are included, they don’t fit as well with the feeling of the game, and their style is nothing extraordinary.
Sound/Music:
The bar for sound and music in story-driven games has been raised by successively more astounding achievements. Games like Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne, and now Thief: Deadly Shadows, give us gloriously verbal protagonists and NPCs who can convey their entire personality in a few choicely voiced phrases. In terms of voice acting and sound design, T:DS is a more than worthy successor in the franchise, and certainly helps raise the bar. Without the cut scenes we enjoyed in the first two games, T:DS doesn’t have nearly as much opportunity to “wow” us with its music, perfectly composed to combine traditional medieval-sounding instrumentation with throbbing industrial beats. In-game sound, however, is as good as ever, with whole levels rendered terrifying mostly by virtue of overheard whispers, clanking chains, dripping water, and the dimly audible stomping of huge feet.
Gameplay:
Alas poor rope arrows, I miss thee. The gameplay elements that remain from the first two games in the series are much improved: mantling is easier, for example. I fell off ladders much less often, and weapons (with sword replaced by dagger) are more effective even though fighting has been rendered much simpler. The changes are another thing altogether. Without rope/vine arrows, which enabled you to discover completely unexpected routes to your destination, the mantling skill is nearly useless. There’s nowhere to go! By giving us extremely limited climbing gloves to use instead (you can’t go around corners or over tiny strips of wood; Garrett is a master thief and I’m a better climber than he is), it’s almost like the game has an entire layer lopped off of it. Want to take the aforementioned “Thieves Highway”? Don’t bother. It isn’t there. Rooftops are uninspired dead-ends in this city. For all its improved graphics, the game itself has become more two-dimensional than either of its predecessors.
Having the ability to switch between third- and first-person changes the feel of manipulating Garrett, but the player easily adjusts, and the result is the welcome discovery that Garrett looks pretty darn cool. Of course, I miss his cloak, but you can’t have everything. People new to the series should keep in mind that Thief is a first-person “sneaker,” and while you can go in with fire arrows blazing if you wish, it somewhat defeats the purpose. Of course, in the first two games, choosing Expert difficulty increased your loot requirements and added the additional caveat that you could not kill anyone (human). This drove home the idea that a truly professional thief doesn’t leave a body trail. As a friend likes to say, “you’re playing Thief, not Assassin.” Thief: Deadly Shadows no longer makes this distinction, and you can run gleefully through the tiny city streets like Charlie Manson if you wish. Yes, the AI for your enemies is much improved at higher difficulties, and guards will notice if you bump a chair out of place or take a significant item, but truthfully, combat has become much less difficult. Note that there has been a confirmed bug with the AI in that each time you restore/load a game, the difficulty is reset to Normal. In order to truly play through the game on “Expert”, you have to change the difficulty before each level and never restore or load your game during that level. Since I played through the game on Normal anyway (I’ve got nothing to prove), I didn’t notice, but players looking for more of a challenge might be a trifle disappointed.
A welcome change, at least to me, is the lock picking. Gone are the days of simply holding down your mouse button and praying for that grating sound to stop. Now, lock picking is a “mini game” of sorts, wherein you look for the “sweet spot,” in concentric rings, and hope you get the darn thing open before the guards hear you messing around. The tension is welcome. Also interesting are flasks of oil which can be used to put guards on the slip ‘n slide, or lit ablaze to send them to their fiery deaths (smoke ‘em if you got ‘em). You also, in third-person mode, get the ability to press yourself up against the wall, making it easier to hide in thin slivers of shadow. I didn’t use this ability much, since I didn’t use third-person mode that often, but it was certainly useful (I mostly just crouch).
I’m going to say another thing about the new “city” environment that particularly bothered me: guards know Garrett is a thief, and will attack him on sight. There are wanted posters up with his face on them, everyone seems to know not only who he is, what he looks like, and what he does for a living, but they also know his address. You spend much of your time in the city dodging guards.
Another addition to the game is a “faction” rating with the Hammers and Pagans. When your rating is low, faction members will attack you on sight, and when it’s higher or “Allied,” they will ignore or assist you, (the only time I ever liked a Pagan ratman was when he said “Hello, Sneaksie Thief” to Garrett as he passed). I didn’t mind the faction rating element, and it was in fact entertaining to get my faction levels up and move more freely around the city. If the city guard had been just another faction, one with which I could raise my faction rating, and which started off merely “suspicious,” I wouldn’t have minded. As it stands, however, Garrett the master thief, who says himself that it’s nearly impossible to see a Keeper who doesn’t want to be seen, is obviously a clumsy oaf bumbling into every drunken guard between the South Quarter and the Docks.
In Thief 2:The Metal Age, Garrett’s apartment is being staked out (this begins the “Thieves Highway” level). What does he do? He grabs everything that isn’t nailed down and takes off across the rooftops to get his revenge, abandoning that apartment as compromised. In Thief: Deadly Shadows, Ed McMahon could’ve showed up at Garrett’s door with a giant check and a bouquet of balloons and I wouldn’t have been surprised. The feeling we got in the other games in the series was that Garrett was a shadow, a man easily hiding an anonymous face amongst the teeming masses. They were his prey, and he was the cunning predator. In T:DS, he’s not so much predator as he is the type of neighbor who’ll borrow your hedge trimmer and never return it. In a series built on the personality of its protagonist, this seems like a serious blunder, as does the lack of difference between killing and not killing. When there is no difference in the risk or reward assigned to committing random crime or killing as opposed to simply knocking someone unconscious, the game is taking a great leap backward in terms of emergent gameplay.
Enjoyment:
The Thief series has always offered something that other first-person shooters usually don’t: the opportunity to avoid fighting. This type of experience is not a draw for everyone, but for some, it’s richer and more rewarding (not just in terms of loot) than unlimbering the mini-gun. It’s hard to explain the enjoyment I get out of creeping along slowly, tailing a guard, ducking into a shadow to avoid his gaze as he turns to check behind him, then swiftly conking him on the head with my trusty blackjack and dumping his body in a dark corner somewhere. Suffice to say, it’s a rush. You have the thrill of being discovered, of being caught, of being found out, not just the adrenaline rush of chewing through baddies trying not to die. It may be an acquired taste.
Multiplayer:
n/a
Overall Impression:
I enjoyed the game immensely, and it was only upon finishing it and reflecting upon it for this review that I developed many of the regrets I now convey to you. If I were an X-Box player coming to this game never having played the rest of the series, I would find it a diverting and interesting experience, but not all that groundbreaking, and perhaps a bit confusing given that no attempt is made to explain the previous story to newcomers. As a Thief fan, however, I can’t help but sigh wistfully over what might have been had the final chapter of Garrett’s career been in the same vein as the first two.
Compared to its earlier incarnations, and despite the sweeping implications of its story, this game just felt small. It felt like purchasing a new Harry Potter novel only to discover it’s a mere 200 pages long. In time, I’ll come back to the series and play all three games, but I can’t imagine my feelings about the third will change. Is it a good game? Yes. Is it worth playing for fans of the series? Certainly. Is it all it could have been? Not even close.
Marketing Efforts Towards Women:
They got nothing special, although of course these days, nothing can be better than something. Sure, there are female guards and witches and Keepers, so women are portrayed in the same kinds of authoritative positions as men, but there are no strong female characters (that I can spoil, anyway) like the Viktoria of the first and second games. By drawing no real distinction between male and female characters, Thief: Deadly Shadows gives us what we’ve long asked for: a good game that appeals to both genders as much as any character-driven shooter with a male protagonist will.
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