Thief - First Impressions

One lump or two?

Thanks to the generosity of my bro, I've managed to nab a Thief pre-order for X-mas! So now that it's been released, what's it like? Thief made it onto my list for a couple of reasons - firstly it's a reboot of the critically acclaimed Thief series made by legendary Looking Glass Studios, a studio behind another classic series, the System Shock series. While I've never played the original extensively, I have peeked over a friend's shoulder while he played it, and what I saw looked good. The second reason I wanted the game is that the developer Eidos Montreal were behind the project and if Deus Ex: Human Revolution was anything to go by, they would probably do the franchise justice.

Anyway after playing the game for over 3 hours, these are my thoughts:

What I like

• Graphics: Really digging the graphics. Great animations, shadow effects and realistic models. The only thing that's annoying me though is that the lip-synching seems a bit off during some cutscenes.
• Setting: I love the Steampunk setting - there should be more games based on this genre.

What I don't like

• Limited character interaction: I'm not sure what character interaction was like in the original but when comparing this to Eidos Montreal's Deus Ex: Human Revolution, it seems very limited.
• Claustrophobic maps: As I haven't played much of the original Thief I can't really speculate if this is similar to the original in terms of the maps or not, although I'm thinking not from the little I've seen of the original. The maps in Thief seem very claustrophobic and while there are multiple ways to get in and out of places, you seem constricted by which ways you can take. i.e. I would've liked it if you could explore more rooftops in Thief or at least take advantage of them instead of the ones prescribed to me by the game.
• Darkness = invisible: Another point I'm unsure about when compared to the original but compared to other games, it really seems you're totally invisible when you're in the darkness, even if you're only a foot away from NPCs! Not very realistic (but I'll probably eat my words later in the game when it gets really difficult)!

Verdict

Thief has got high production values and seems to, at least on the surface, capture the spirit of the original however that might not be enough for veteran Thief fans.