[Erkki]

Thief: Deadly Shadows is another very strong game in the series, and these are still the king of stealth games in my opinion. As a matter of fact, Deadly Shadows may very well be my favourite Thief game of the three. Below I'll just give my semi-random thoughts.

Levels

Loading zones
The levels are optimised for Xbox, each mission is usually cut into 2 levels, but you can travel back and forth as much as you want. The loading times are not too long, but not very short either.

The City
The City is made out of 6 or 7 levels (districts) with loading zones between them -- sometimes this gets annoying, but most of the time you won't have to travel that much between the districts. It is actually quite fun just to lurk around and loot as much as you can, but once you've get to know the district by heart, it gets boring to have to go through it again, unless there's something new going on. There are civilians lurking around, and Hammerites and Pagans, who will even fight with each other. Near the ending of the game, a lot of fights are going on without your involvement.

The Buildings and Stores
There are quite a few stores in the city, some buy your loot, some sell you equipment. And there are differences -- not all fences buy every kind of loot and not all stores sell every kind of item. This was a bad decision, it just helps add boring travelling through the districts sometimes.
Instead of having so many distinct stores, they could have added various small buildings to enter and loot -- most of the walls and doors hide nothing behind them.

Missions
A few of the missions are absolutely brilliant! And most of them are good. Some missions take place in the City streets so I don't know the exact mission count.

Graphics, Sound etc.

Graphics Smaphics
I guess this depends on taste really, but in some way the graphics are really impressive, while in some ways they fall short. This has always been a problem with Ion Storm games. The lighting and shadows do look extremely good. I especially liked the bloom effect (one of the lies in the Gamespy review was that there is no bloom), but unfortunately it disables anti-aliasing.
The performance on my computer was quite good, only in one single room in the entire game, when looking at a certain angle did it slow down a bit.


Character Models
As in Deus Ex, and Deus Ex 2, the character models are not on par with industry standards, although the lighting effects look really cool on some of them. The Gamespy reviewer who said the lips don't move is a fucking liar. The lip-sync is not only existent, but actually very good, seemed I could almost read the lips. He is right about the NPC's occasionally looking like wax dummies though. Animations are average.

Freaky physics
The physics are mostly excellent, and can be used for guard distraction. But in a couple of occasions, I managed to make huge statues fall down by slightly touching them while crouch-walking. And there were a couple of other similar bugs.

The sound is good
The sound effects are all excellent in my opinion, but the directional sound just isn't as good as in Thief II. Maybe my memory is playing tricks on me, but I remember that determining a noise's position was much more precise in Thief II.

Equipment and Stuff

Lock picking
I like this new system more than the first games, but many of the locks in the same missions have the same pattern. So picking locks gets pretty boring. There should be more locks that are unpickable, because the fun action of stealing keys from guards is rendered almost unnecessary as nearly every lock in the game can be picked and the guards CAN NOT HEAR lockpicking sounds. THIS IS THE WORST SINGLE GRIPE I HAVE WITH THE GAME.

Dagger
Seemed useless to me. Can't imagine why anyone would use it. Give me back the sword any day -- at least I could break down doors with it.

Bow, bombs and stuff
The equipment is very satisfactory to use. They just sound great, look great when used (except moss) and have some fun effects. I didn't use all of the things much because I tried to avoid killing and knocking people out most of the time. No rope arrows is a minor grievance, but I can live without them.
It's too bad that you can only carry 5 of some items. I was always saving them and didn't experiment as much as I would have wanted to.

Last but not least, the AI

Not sure about the AI. As I remember, it wasn't much better overall in the previous games. Probably it was worse. There are some things about it though that just annoy me:

• No guard will ever close a door you opened or light a torch you put out, although they do complain about a lot if they see such things.
• No guard can hear lockpick sounds even if the lock being picked is right next to them. This is pretty sad.
• They don't cooperate as much as should be logical. Even when 2 or 3 of them are searching for me together, there doesn't seem to be any order in the way they search.
• If they resume their patrol after not finding anything, they will walk back to the exact point on the route where they were interrupted. This looks stupid sometimes. They should find the nearest point on their route and continue from there.

Otherwise, I think the AI is pretty good, or at least ok for a Thief game.

Conclusion

I like it a lot.

Pros
It's good.

Cons
It has a lot of minor flaws.

[Erkki]

I forgot to mention two more things that bugged me:

There's a maximum for every arrow and item type you can carry. For example you can carry 25 water arrows, 20 flashbombs, etc. But when you already have the maximum, the game still lets you pick the objects up -- they will just disappear. Doesn't make that much of a difference, but still a bit annoying.

Another thing is that you can't shoot arrows through railings, fences and such things, even if visually it seems there is room for a cannon ball to fit through. The arrow will just hit the air between the rail supports.

[Zack]

Good Review of the game, Erkki, However, I don't think that I will play the game because of two things. 1: I tried to enjoy the demos of Thief 1 and II, but I just never got into them. But, I did play Splinter Cell, which is the first Stealth game I've ever enjoyed playing. 2: I don't have the system requirements for the game. They're a little higher than my computer has.

The part in your review where you wrote "that no guard will ever close a door you opened or light a torch you put out, although they do complain about a lot if they see such things" reminded me of the Siberia level in No One Lives Forever 2. I'm currently trying to infiltrate the main records building, and I've noticed that after the guards have finished checking a room where I forgot to close the door, they go back onto their patrol without closing the door. It's a small hiccup in the AI, but it's strange that they would forget to close one door. Still, the AI so far in the game is excellent, and very realistic.

Overall, nice little review Erkki, and I'm glad you liked it.

[Erkki]

Thanx, Zak.

BTW I remembered one more thing that I meant to mention in the review (I knew I should have written these down while playing):

Climbing
Climbing is in some ways made better, but there are some rather annoying quirks: a few ladders in the game are buggy so that you usually start sliding down when you reach the top. This is because of another thing that is both nice and extremely bad at the same time: if you get close to an edge of a horizontal surface, you will slowly slide down. It's nice because it will help you fall down more silently (from crates for example). But it's not so nice because if you climb on a narrow pipe, you will immediately start sliding down (and you can't get back up once you have started sliding). So you never really know if a place can be climbed except by trial and error.
Slightly related -- barely any climbable rooftops at all in the city. WHY, OH WHY?

[Royal Fool]

There are also numerous places where you can climb out of the actual geometry and fall into the skybox.

[jjacob]

Nice review! Seems like you forgot to mention the climbing gloves though
Heh once I got detected by a city watch guard and simply climbed up the wall, got a little worried when he said "You have to come down sometime!" but was later surprised when my cowardly tactic had worked!
But the city geometry could've used some more work indeed - I wished the city would've been more immersive, bigger and better designed.

[Dalixam]

The cradle mission scared the pants off me

My biggest annoyance was with the AI. One example is when I had killed two guards and ran off two hide in the shadows from an approaching third, he saw the two dead guards and started searching for me, but when he couldn't find me he concluded that "it was probably nothing" and went back to his patrol route. There are two dead bodies on the floor!

Other than such small annoyances I enjoyed the game very much. I am tempted to replay it and find as much loot as possible. My record is 98% in the craddle mission.

[Erkki]

Oops, yes. Forgot to mention the gloves.

Originally Posted by Dalixam

Other than such small annoyances I enjoyed the game very much. I am tempted to replay it and find as much loot as possible. My record is 98% in the craddle mission.

Hehe. Surprisingly the Cradle was the only place (or maybe there was one other level) where I managed to find 100%.

[jjacob]

Heh me too! That's brilliant, guess I wasn't the only one who spent about half an hour in each room :eek: For that mission alone, I'd buy the game, seriously.

edit: ok enough time has passed, I'm going to replay the game, and this time with the sweet difficulty-level fix wooo!

By the way, what *are* the chances of Thief 4 ever seeing the light with all that Warren Spector business going on?

[ragnar]

I think I'm going to review this game, because I'm beginning to have too much opinions on it now (I'm not finished with it yet though).