Game is entertaining enough I guess. I haven't played the first 2 thief games at all and I barely touched Deadly Shadows, so I cannot really compare the games. I can compare it to Dishonored and Deux EX however, and on that note it simply falls woefully short in just about every department. The story is utter bollocks and threadbare as it is, yet even the little leftover snippets are completely undone by inept story telling. I'm about halfway through it now and I haven't the foggiest about what the hell is going on. There are a bunch of cut-scenes bookending the chapters, but when the characters are all so poorly designed and paper thin, who the hell's gonna pay attention? If you decide to pay attention anyway you better turn on the subtitles. The game is burdened with what's possibly the worst audio mixing job in years, and the ambient dialogue is both poorly written and repeated ad nauseum. "I feel like a tooth is coming loose" may well be 2014's arrow to the knee.
In terms of gameplay it's just nuts and bolts stealth with the occasional and often surprisingly involved puzzle thrown in. Just don't expect clever setups like Dishonored's masquerade ball here. Speaking of Dishonored, Thief comes complete with its own token brothel stage. It's a decidedly more r-rated take on a very AO-rated subject matter (which I like), but in terms of gameplay it's - once again - nowhere near as inventive and complex as the the smilar scenario found in Arcane Studio's modern classic. Granted, Garret is not an Assassin, but that doesn't mean he couldn't have exchanged his belt-tastic (his attire looks like something Tetsuya Nomura might have designed having just woken up from a particularly wild, S&M-flavored fever dream) leather outfit for something more casual every once in a while and partake in some delightful daylight thievery for a change. Maybe that's not quite in keeping with the spirit of the series, but Thief simply doesn't mix up its gameplay enough for my taste. You're swooping from shadow to shadow, avoiding guard patterns while picking up anything that isn't bolted down in between. This works well enough and is reasonably entertaining, but it's also everything you'll ever do. Since you have to go back and forth in the annoyingly designed and laughably fragmented city hub time and again, you'll also come across the same guard patterns over and over. It's moderately exciting at first, but after a while it just gets old and you start yearning for a way to reach your destinations in a less time consuming matter. As for the man himself, one of the few pieces of advice he manages to give his thieving protege Erin before she goes and inevitably does stupid things in the tutorial mission, is that it's not about how much you steal, but about the quality of the loot. Then he basically goes and disregards his own advice for the next 20 or 30 hours (this is a big game) in order to amass the word's most exhaustive collection of fountain pens and ink bottles. He's more cleptomaniac than master thief really.
The one thing I really like about Thief is how well it uses the first person perspective. It really feels like there's a body attached to the head mounted camera for a change. The hand animations in particular are just wonderful. Thief is a delightfully tactile experience. Other than that it looks okay. Visually it's basically "Unreal Engine 3 - The game: Orange and Teal Edition". It's all cobblestones and wooden beams in a City with a population of approximately 50. It's competent, but also by the numbers. I swear I've seen those bricks and wooden structures hundreds of times before. Does UE3 ship with a folder full of stock shaders?
I started right away on the Master Thief difficulty and disabled Garret's Focus powers, by the way. Guards are still hella stupid, but they are at least incredibly deadly once they catch you. Stealth is an absolute must.
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