I wasn’t planning on doing a review this week due to exams, so this Bumper Giant Size edition has come as a shock to all.
Thief III: Deadly Shadows is one of those games you’ve probably seen a million times in game stores as a budget title (it’s usually next to Tomb Raider: the Angel of Darkness). I bought that for about a fiver, and it didn’t work. Two weeks later, I saw the first two thief games in one box for two pounds.
They didn’t work either.
However, I was able to eventually get them both working, after an extensive amount of faffing around, though it took the better part of a year for me to get Thief II working.
So, let’s start Reviewing!
First of all, I have the $old-out Software edition, so the cover leaves a fair bit to be desired; the boxarts for the two games combined only take up about a third of the front cover. Thief’s boxart reminds me of Assassin’s Creed, which isn’t really a good thing; the game emphasises not getting seen and discourages killing of humans. Thief II’s a little better in this regard; we see the protagonist (Garrett) standing in partial shadow, bow ready, eyes darting around, which is more the type of thing you’ll be doing.
I’m going to continue to compare and contrast the two for the remainder, though I’ve only played the first few levels of each so far (it takes me a while to get through most games, but hey, I get my money’s worth). Thief starts off with a thieves’ guild training course, which can be skipped, although it sets up the story a bit. The first level sees you breaking into a manor to retrieve a specific object, so it’s pretty much what you’d expect. Level Two, you need to spring your fence from prison. A bit high stakes for this stage, but I’m game. Except that the prison is located adjacent to a Haunted Mine. Full of Zombies. That can’t be taken down with your blackjack. Or Sword. Or ANYTHING other than holy water arrows. Which can only be made at certain points. I’m not saying that there SHOULDN’T be zombies(except I am), but not for the second level. Still, let’s see what level three has in store.
The third level sees you breaking into a tomb. It’s almost entirely full of the undead. Where there are no zombies, there are lizards who belch poison gas.
Thief II on the other hand is (I understand) almost completely free of non-human opponents, and the levels are much more focused on stealing things. You know, like a Thief would. What’s more, in the original Thief, to finish a mission on Normal Difficulty, all you need to do is grab the necessary loot. In Thief II on normal, one of those objectives is always to ESCAPE with the loot, which is far more realistic.
I was surprised to learn that during development of Thief (originally an action title called Dark Camelot), the plot was established first, and the levels tailored to fit, while in Thief II, exactly the opposite was done, and in my opinion, to better effect.
Now let me make this clear, this is not another MYST/realMYST thing. They are both great games. You play from a first person perspective, and use various tools to move around unnoticed, such as water arrows to douse torches to create more darkness, or wash away inconvenient bloodstains. The HUD has a little “light gem”, which shows how visible you are at any given moment, however you need to rely on your own ears to work out how heavy you’re footfalls are, or how close the guards are. Going unnoticed is its own reward, as you can eavesdrop on conversations between NPCs , which may lead you in the direction of treasure. But mostly they bitch about their bosses, which is still pretty entertaining.
My only major gripe is that they are next to impossible to run on modern PCs, and there is not (as of yet) one patch that just makes them work. Thankfully, there’s a pretty supportive community of fans out there, who have managed to get helpful links to fixes for whatever problems you’re having, and believe me, you will have at least two major ones. All Dark Engine games are incompatible with multiple processors, and even if you have a single core, chances are that it’s doing something called hyperthreading, which means that it’s acting as though there are two processors. Also, the video files used for mission briefings use a codec which needs to be registered, except that the company no longer supports them, so good luck with that too.
The only thing I can really say is it’s worth the effort.
Unless you only got Thief 1. That might be disappointing.
