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Thief:
Deadly Shadows
Score: 8.3 / 10
One glance at Thief: Deadly Shadows, and
you might possibly mistake it for a medieval Splinter Cell. That
description might not be too inaccurate – instead of shooting out light
bulbs, you extinguish torches with water arrows. Instead of a visibility
bar, you have a "light gem". Outside of an optional first person mode,
even the controls are the same. But beyond the surface, there's a lot
more to Thief: Deadly Shadows. This makes sense, as the series has been
around for a little while. Although previously confined to the PC,
master thief Garrett has been pulling his sneaky tricks back when
Ubisoft was still making nothing but Rayman games.
The best feature is the pure freedom you have. Deadly Shadows still has
a linear structure of levels, but they're all built around the central
hub city that you inhabit. The levels themselves are far more expansive
as well, allowing multiple entrance points and lots of different nooks,
crannies, and lofts to aid your infiltration --
vaguely reminiscent of Hitman. There's a
lot to explore too, and exploring is what you're going to want to do.
Thief doesn't hand you your weapons and give you a slap on the back. No,
you've got to work for every arrow you sling, every land mine you toss,
every health drink you imbibe. If you don't find them lying around in
chests, you can just steal some of the precious jewellery lying around
and sell it on black market,
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earning you some nice cash to outfit
yourself with more pointy objects. Obsessive completionists can also
amuse themselves by trying to complete each level with 100% loot stolen.
Most of the time, you're not even given a map to a level – you have to
go out and find it yourself. They aren't always entirely useful, as they
are crudely drawn, and there's no magical "You Are Here" indicator, so
you still spend a lot of time trying to identify your surroundings. As
you progress in the game, you even meet up with two different factions,
of whom you can complete various subquests for. They don't drastically
alter the outcome of the game or the levels you play through, but it
does make the game feel less stringent.
Speaking of player freedom, if you're used to the sparsely placed
checkpoints, Thief refreshingly lets you save anywhere. It's not that
the game is easy - certainly not. The AI guards are smart enough to hunt
you down and alert others to your presence, although dashing into a dark
corner for a few minutes will usually lose them. Garrett has quite a
pair of running legs, but that's about it -- put him in combat with
pretty much anyone and most likely you'll find yourself being carried
swiftly to the "restart" screen.
Like most great stealth games, the game rewards you for executing some
sneaky maneuvers over random smashing. You can creep up to anyone and
either whack 'em over the head with a blackjack for a silent knockout,
or simply stab them in the neck for a loud and violent death. Water
arrows let you wash off blood stains, and moss arrows let you walk over
loud platforms without being heard. You can even pickpocket certain
characters, taking either their money or weaponry. It is a lot of fun
stealing a shaman's staff and watching as he runs chaotically,
completely defenseless. Garrett also has a mechanical eye that lets him
zoom in on distant objects, but it lacks the feature it needs most:
night vision. Approximately 90% of the game is spent with the lights
off, and while characters are given a vague glow-in-the-dark aura so you
can see them in the pitch black, more often you'll either have to turn
up the brightness or simply stumble through the darkness. Even just a
portable torch would've make navigation a little easier.
Ion Storm has had the very ambitious concept of launching their games on
both the PC and console at the same. Unfortunately, the result is an
interface that is clearly not meant to be navigated with a controller.
Working your way through the text briefings in an unnecessary pain, and
the inventory management is awkward too. And for a game where you
constantly need to refer to a map, it's not the best idea to bury it two
screens deep in the menu, especially with the lack of a shortcut button.
Since Deadly Shadows shares the same engine as Deus Ex: Invisible War,
you get the same gorgeous visuals, amazing lighting and incredible
physics. And, alas, it once again seems that the mighty Xbox just simply
cannot keep up. The game runs steadily enough during regular sneaking
(despite some irritating screen tearing), but once you alert any number
of guards, the framerate drops dramatically. Don't even try playing
around with the ragdoll physics too much, as it tends to drop the frames
into the single digit range. The load time is also quite exasperating,
taking at least thirty seconds to load new areas (or restarted after
dying) and sometimes as long as a minute. There's even a few bugs, the
worst of which resets the difficulty level back to normal when you enter
a new area. I'm all for seeing PC games come to the Xbox, as it's a
great alternative to expensive gaming computers, but they definitely
need to be optimized for the platform better.
There's a lot of lessons other stealth games could learn, especially in
its open-endedness and staunch anti-checkpoint agenda. Despite the
technical issues, Thief: Deadly Shadows does more than just a few things
right, and more games could learn some lessons from it.
