Review

Thief: The Dark Project and it's sequel were two of those PC games I heard lots of great things about, but never got around to playing myself. In many ways, they are like the anti-FPS, where your objective is to stay hidden and avoid confrontation as much as possible. For the third game in the series, and first on consoles, the designers have included a third-person view as well and allowed us to switch between the two at any time, but apart from this the idea remains the same.

Playing as a professional thief named Garrett, the aim of the game is to break into heavily guarded areas and make off with artefacts. This is achieved by sneaking around in the shadows and picking your moment to move. As you'd expect, the opening level acts as a tutorial, teaching you to avoid the light, how to walk slowly to avoid noisy footsteps and how to distract guards with your different types of arrows. After completing this level you'll be given you first proper assignment.

This level is a perfect insight into how the rest of the game will unfold. From the moment the level starts you have complete freedom to tackle the objectives in any way you like, and in any order. Your ultimate goal is to steal an Opal which is locked away inside a vault somewhere in the castle but first you'll need to find out where the vault is and how to open it. You can manage this by eavesdropping on conversations and finding documents as you play. Experimenting with different approaches and routes is actually a lot of fun and means you don't really mind playing through large chunks of the level again each time you die.

You'll learn quickly that getting spotted is incredibly hazardous to your health and should the alarm get raised, you're better off restarting the level than waiting around until a few guards set upon you at once. I found it better to play using the first-person view as I never found my view of the action obscured by scenery this way.

However, this definitely has not aged well and feels like a 10-year old game. The visuals do evoke a good atmosphere but the frame rate judders and glitches a lot. The controls can be overly fiddly at times too and it's no fun when you fail to climb through a window because the game doesn't recognise your button presses rather than your inability to move quick enough. This is less of a problem on the superior PC version.

If you are curious about the origins of the Thief series having played the recent reboot, then you'll find a fairly enjoyable game weighed down by it's flaws. Worth a play though.

About the Review

Platform

Microsoft Xbox

Developer

Ion Storm

Publisher

Eidos

Released

11th June 2004