Don't worry, if those guards spot you, you can probably just run away...
GAME DETAILS
Developer: Eidos Montreal
Publisher: Square Enix
Platform: PS4 (reviewed), PS3, Xbox One, Xbox 360, PC
Release Date: February 25, 2014
Price: $59.99
Links: Official website | Amazon
Let's be honest: naming a game Thief brings some expectations along with it. This Eidos Montreal-developed reboot of the classic franchise doesn't share the development pedigree of either of the first two Thief titles (Looking Glass Studios) or Thief: Deadly Shadows (Ion Storm), but by taking the name, it's placing itself in the same lineage as those well-remembered progenitors of the stealth genre.

The new Thief is separated by almost ten years from the last game in the series. Game design has come a long way in that time, and stealth gameplay specifically has come to be a commonplace addition to many other genres since the first Thief helped originate the concept in 1998. Rather than comparing this reboot to the outdated memories (and the very different gaming landscape) of those original titles, then, it's better to ask whether Thief can stand on its own as a modern game, regardless of the baggage of its franchise.

In short, the answer is no. It really can't.

Let's start with the story, or what bits of it are comprehensible, at least. In the prologue, we've barely been introduced to Garrett's new thieving partner, the appropriately spunky and troubled Erin, when we see her falling through a skylight and into an incredibly convenient energy-summoning ritual being performed by a group of mysterious hooded figures. (Is there any other kind of hooded figure?) Garrett is knocked out and awakens a year later to a city transformed by The Gloom, a combination of the bubonic plague and some sort of horrible mental disease that is ravaging the vaguely Victorian, vaguely steampunk citizens of the town.

From there, the game tries its best to weave together an incredible number of disparate plot threads: the mystery of Garrett's disappearance (and convenient year-long amnesia); the whereabouts of Erin; rising civil unrest against an overbearing Baron driven by The Gloom; an ongoing feud with Garrett's "Thief-taker General" nemesis; the appearance of red-eyed, shambling, zombie-like creatures; the meaning of a frequently recurring, white-tinted dreamscape (spoiler alert: it's an allegory for not much at all, really); and a mysterious ethereal force called Primal that's shoehorned in for good measure ("mystical nonsense" is a phrase that kept appearing in my notes as I played the game).

This would be a lot to hold together for a well-written game, but it becomes downright impossible for Thief, which is practically drowning in characters that loudly tell players what is happening rather than showing anything resembling real character development. The Thief-taker General is a particularly scenery-chewing antagonist, but friendly fence Basso and spiritual/political leader Orion also do their best to play as flat stereotypes whose every move can be predicted about five minutes in.

After following the tattered threads of this story through some predictable twists in a brothel, an abandoned asylum, a cavernous underground city, and a ridiculously vast wooden ship, I was hoping for a conclusion that at least brought some closure, if not some meaning, to the preceding cavalcade of events. I don't mind telling you, though, that I could not make the slightest sense out of the game's concluding cut scene. I don't mean that in the "Oh, that's interesting and could be interpreted in a number of ways" sense. I mean it in the "I have no idea what is happening right now, unless maybe time travel and possibly teleportation are involved somehow" sense.


Enlarge / Three whole people... busy night in this part of the city...
Even this confusing mess of a plot might be somewhat forgivable if Thief were able to build an interesting, engaging world for its characters to traipse about in. Unfortunately, the city that serves as the game's hub is pretty lifeless, with ridiculously broad incidental characters that seem to come out of nowhere amid the general emptiness. These token citizens gesticulate wildly with vaguely human motions as they loudly pronounce their actions, giving generally horrid vocal performances and engaging in heavy-handed scripted moments. The seemingly random pans and camera angles that accompany some of the scripted cut scenes don't help matters, especially when keeping things in Garrett's first-person perspective would have been both less distracting and simpler.

Even when not acting out a script, some citizens seem to have been plopped down in the city completely randomly. At a few points, I stumbled upon the same Victorian-dressed couple, apparently happy to be just standing together in the middle of the night, near the end of an alley, staring vaguely into the middle distance and swaying in an idle animation. This handling of non-player characters would have been embarrassing in an early PlayStation 2 game; these days it's downright unforgivable.

Speaking of unforgivable bits, I'd be remiss not to say a few words about the horrendous sound balancing in the game. Sometimes a character's words would be drowned out by the background music despite him standing just a few feet away. Other times a conversation I had overheard through a hole in the wall would continue at full volume even as I stepped away and walked down the hall. Often, unmistakable on-screen actions like floors collapsing or fires raging would go by with nary a sound effect. Less often (but still too often) two incidental conversations would overlap with each other, both at full volume, even as I stepped away from one and right next to the other. I could forgive a couple of these snafus, but the audio issues in Thief were frequent enough to take me right out of the moment with surprising regularity.

On the visual side, the PlayStation 4 version I tested was surprisingly stuttery, with noticeable slowdown and frame rate drops during many sections. Load times were long enough to be annoying as well; every death or new section of town meant a wait of 10 to 15 seconds.

Disjointed gameplay


Enlarge / Oh yeah, Garrett is kind of an acrobatic badass now...
If most everything about the plot is consistently hard to stomach consistently, the basics of Thief's gameplay are at least not actively painful. True to its stealth heritage, much of Thief's gameplay involves sticking to the shadows and avoiding the notice of frequent guards that stand between you and your target (while maybe picking up a few treasures laying about along the way). Garrett has obviously been taking lessons from the likes of Assassin's Creed and Uncharted because he can now run along at a good clip, clamber up ledges and convenient crates, and use a claw to hoist himself higher (though he can only attach to hatched wall panels that literally glow blue, in case you had any chance of missing them). Garrett also has a new sort of stealthy duck-and-swoop gliding move that lets him dart quickly between bits of shadow.

The interface does a pretty good job of giving you visual cues as to when you're well hidden and when you're fully visible in the light, and it's decently forgiving in giving you a chance to quickly duck back out of the way when a guard catches you out of the corner of his eye. The game also gives you a number of methods for distracting guards; you can snuff out the candles and torches that reveal your position to them or take them out stealthily with a well-placed arrow or silent rear takedown.

Still, I found it much too tough to get through most areas without being seen. Part of this is due to the game's generally linear level design that favors narrow hallways or alleyways and often leaves just one or perhaps two feasible paths to your goal (though there are plenty of dead-end treasure rooms along the sides). Guards never seem to be in short supply, and dragging them away from their companions and the strategic choke points that they cling to isn't a walk in the park, even with a pretty handy map and on-screen indicator for where you should or could be going. If you do manage to lure them away from their post, it doesn't take much at all to alert their seemingly heightened sense to your presence, either.

Once you're spotted by these guards... well, one of three things will happen. If you're spotted by a lone guard with no backup, you'll probably be able to take him out by activating your time-limited "focus" powers and conking him a couple of times with your blackjack. If you're totally overwhelmed and cornered by enemies with no easy way out, you'll probably just be killed before you can even draw back one of a wide variety of useful arrows.

More often than you should, though, you'll simply be able to use your incredible sprinting speed to run away from your attackers and go back into hiding. Guards seem to forget about you almost immediately when you slide out of their view, to the point where you can often turn a corner, leap behind a box, and watch as the guard stands there looking confused as to where you possibly could have gone.

Many times, after being spotted, I was able to simply dash toward the next objective on my heads-up display and make it there before the guards could converge, ending their pursuit with a convenient loading screen. Once, I was able to pickpocket my target even after he had spotted me and then run away down the hall and into the safety of a closet before his guards could lay a hand on me. In one particularly silly situation, I ran away from a guard and made a circuit through two doors at the opposite end of a room until I was able to loop back around to the rear of my assailant and surprise him. The sheer exploitability of this braindead AI doesn't only kill the stealth gameplay, but also the entire mood of the game (to its credit, the game does offer a mode where being spotted leads to instant death, which might actually be preferable).


Enlarge / Oh great, less sneaking and more running through fire. Just what I wanted.
For a game that's supposedly about stealth, there are also way too many sections in Thief where Garrett is all alone and forced to engage with some extremely unengaging puzzles and platforming bits. Oh look, here's a section where you have to turn cranks to rearrange some moving staircases and create a path up a tower. Here's a locked door that requires you to backtrack a few dozen rooms to find its key. Here's yet another cavernous room where you have to find the well-hidden exit point to move on to the next room—or else wander around lost for a half-hour or so (this happened to me twice).

There's the random "action" scene where you have to run away as a burning bridge collapses around you—because that's the kind of thing Call of Duty players like, right? There are the downright pointless sections where you have to sidle along some exposed pipes from a third-person perspective because hey, if Nathan Drake can do it, dangit, Garrett can too! There's the extremely claustrophobic "open world" inter-chapter hub where you can break into random people's houses and pick up their valuables, Legend of Zelda style.

There are way too many sections in the game where it feels like a producer was just trying to check off some hot gameplay element from some other title or genre on some checklist. Not only are none of these sections particularly well done, but they all take away from any sense of tension or flow you might have been feeling from the decently executed stealth sections.

It all contributes to an overall feeling of a disjointed game that doesn't really know what it's doing or what it wants to be. Which is a shame, because there are bits and pieces at the core of Thief that could have been salvaged together into a decent overall game. As it stands, the new Thief is a confusing, confused mess that doesn't live up to its namesake.

The good

Garrett's new duck-and-swoop move is pretty slick
Decent interface for stealth maneuvers
The bad

The plot is an incoherent mess
Seriously, the ending didn't make a lick of sense
Hackneyed writing and wooden performances
Level design is much too linear
Guards are too sensitive to your every movement
Guard AI is easy to outrun and easier to fool
Lots of badly done, out-of-place platforming and puzzle bits
The ugly

Why does every game have to have some mystical ghost nonsense these days?
Verdict: Go buy Dishonored instead. If you already own Dishonored, just play it again.