Thief (2014)

 

The Thief series is known as being a famous example of the stealth genre perfected, apparently. I've never played any of them, the first one looks pretty daunting and difficult so I've never bothered

I picked up Thief 2014 on sale for a few dollars and have been reluctant to try it for a long time, mostly because stealth genre in general just isn't my thing, but I decided to play through this game anyway because it says its under 10 hours long and its triple A quality so it cant be that bad.

The game does have a refined visual polish about it, the graphics right off the bat can be impressive at times, especially with how immersive it can feel. Just being able to look down and see your legs, watch your character actually pickup objects in the world, the lockpicking and all interactions in the game feel polished and high quality, like true first person view. And the city atmosphere and environments are quite believable and compelling, you really do start to feel like a cloaked thief wandering around in the night, eavesdropping in on people and listening to their conversations, sneaking past and unlocking doors while they're oblivious , etc.

But really, the game still isn't for me.
The bulk of the game is typical stealth formula I just don't find fun
You'll spend most of the game slowly crouching around, turning a corner and hearing some enemy guards talk to each other, so you're basically forced to just sit there and wait until the guards stop having their conversation and their AI decides to start randomly path finding a patrol route, so you can either sneak past or pick them off. Thats the gist of the entire game.  Much of it is spent just standing still and waiting for NPC's to trigger their 'patrol' script so you can progress, frankly its just fucking boring, and I basically hate stealth in genera because of this stuff. A lot of times I just find myself hunched over in my chair, eyes closed, half asleep, waiting for them to move so I can finally progress. Yawn.

Thankfully, the game has a forgiving quicksave system, where you can quicksave anytime you're not in combat or an enemy is aware of you. So naturally I would smash the damn quicksave button any time I made even an inch of progress, cause there's no way in hell I'm being sent back and having to wait another 40 seconds for the NPC to finish their conversation I already heard and then start patrolling.

The game throws all sorts of tools you can use, mostly just different sorts of bow arrows, but I never really used any of it, it all felt just gimmicky and pointless, like 'water arrows' to shoot out torches to give yourself darkness,  standard arrows to kill people with, blunt arrows to destroy objects, stuff like that. The thing is the arrows that actually kill enemies are in such short supply that I never found a real opportunity to even use them, I just ignored it mostly.
What the combat does consist of, is mostly just sneaking behind a guard , waiting for the 'Press LB to takedown' prompt to appear, then watching an animation of you killing the guard for 10 seconds. Repeat. More often than not, however, the animation will take so long that another guard will walk up to you by the time you're done. And you also typically have to make sure to hold X and drag the corpse away or you'll get spotted.
Oh yeah, the keyboard and mouse controls are confusing as hell and clunky and just aren't good. Plug in a controller and use that and it works much better.  The first time I played the game for 2 hours, i dropped it for months afterwards, cause the controls were just so awkward and fumbly and nothing made sense, then when I came back i plugged in a controller and It was more intuitive.

But still, the controls in general are hit and miss and kind of stupid.
Like how there's a 'focus' system which highlights things in the environment you can interact with (which is incredibly useful)  and also helps you in combat depending on the upgrades you get, like slowing down time, or giving you more 1 press buttons to takedown enemies

However, this 'focus' system has a weird quirk, in that you have to use an enemy to fill the gauge up so it lasts longer, but the thing is even when the gauge runs out you can still tap the button to briefly highlight things in the environment.  Which is the main use of the mechanic, to be able to highlight items in the environment that are required to progress.
So you find yourself in a position where you dont actually want to use items to fill the gauge, because you would be constantly wasting it whenever you just want to highlight objects in the environment. Its utterly bizarre they didnt have two separate buttons, one for highlighting objects, and one for using the entire gauge. Maybe that exists but im unaware, but that just goes to show how unintuitive and clunky some of the mechanics overall can be.
So I spent most of the game with 0% focus gauge, spamming the focus button to briefly be able to see objects in the enviorment that I needed to use to progress, instead of using the system the way its intended I guess. Either way it doesn't seem like a particularly enjoyable or fun mechanic, using it to try to aid you in 'combat' is also clunky as hell, you unlock more 'press X to kill' takedown abilities, but half the time you try to use it you realize you dont have enough gauge and you end up taking damage anyway.

So besides sneaking behind guards and pressing a button to take them out, you can also engage in free melee combat. By swinging around a blackjack in typical first person action. This is goofy and awkward and stupid, and the first quarter of the game I couldn't even figure out how to use the damn thing cause the game does such a poor job explaining that you have to go to this certain spot on the map and talk to a black market guy that sells you items and upgrades, only when you buy the blackjack from him can you actually press RB to use the melee.
The game also uses a sort of Assassins Creed kind of control system, where you hold LT to sprint , and your character automatically makes jumps and climbs walls depending on context, this can be decent, but also at times can be fumbling and frustrating.

So once you go and buy the Blackjack, now you can actually attack enemies whenever you want. And how this works doesn't play very well
You basically just tap the melee button and you sort of hone in on the enemy from up to a dozen feet away, you can also tap a button to dodge enemy attacks. So it becomes this goofy game of waiting for the enemy to swing his weapon, tapping dodge which has an extremely forgiving timing window, then your character is almost guaranteed to dodge the attack,  then you tap the melee button and you zoom into the enemy doing damage or he blocks. Repeat until death, which can take a lot of hits if you haven't upgraded your blackjack damage. (Which is about the only upgrade I actually cared to try to get)

It's not very good and obviously its not suppose to be a combat game, but I wasn't having much fun with the boring stealth mechanics so I tried to upgrade my health and blackjack damage at the blackmarket shop as much as possible so I would at least have a chance of engaging in some action packed combat, it worked OK and I was able to finally start taking out enemies without having to constantly wait for their stupid patrol scripts to trigger, but still I couldn't just walk in and use melee on everyone, it only works up to 2 guards, anymore than that and you're screwed. Also the enemy animations are pretty crap and the hitboxes are super inconsistent and buggy.

About halfway through the game it starts trying to be this horror game where you go into a mental asylum or something and there's a bunch of monsters there that YOU CANT DAMAGE so you have to sneak past them. The change of tone was appreciated, but it just felt so out of place. Its like they suddenly wanted the game to be Amnesia, but the random tone change was so jarring and felt 'phoned in' to capitalize on some trend in gaming at the time.
It's almost like I would have preferred the entire game to have this sort of horror tone, but oh well.

But yeah, these monster enemies you cant kill are just a slog. Its even more crouching around in dark corners waiting for their patrol scrips so you can ever so slowly creep by, mashing quicksave every few inches, and when they suddenly decide to spot you, either running as fast as possible towards the objective marker, or just reloading and trying again. Its not great.


The story starts off kind of compelling for the first half of the game, the whole grimdark Victorian tone, being in a hub-world city semi-open world Victorian streets and plagues and the sort is a good setting, but towards the end of the game it starts throwing in a bunch of mystical, paranormal, magical, corny cliche damsel in distress love story that it all falls apart and quickly becomes a forgettable lame trope. Not much else to say. There's hardly any characters to speak of, just the main character which is a typical edgelord, but hes entertaining enough, and this obese 'sidekick' guy you
interact with here and there, that helps you out or gives you side-quests that give you gold to help unlocking stuff.

That's the other mechanic, gold.
When going about the environments you can pickup all sorts of random things that instantly give you gold, which at first I had no idea what the point was, because the game does a poor job explaining that there's an upgrade system, and where the shops are.
But yeah you go around grabbing stuff for gold, and there's special challenges you can do per level that give you more gold, like doing so many takedowns, not being spotted, etc. At the end of a chapter it gives you a 'completion' screen where it goes over what you did and awards you gold, its sort of fun but I didn't really care too much about upgrades or anything, only one point I went out of my way to do a side quest to get a bit more gold so I could unlock more melee damage upgrade, but that's it. Oh, and doing that sidequest was a pain in the ass and took almost 2 hours of walking around in circles running all across the hub-world city trying to follow quest markers, wasn't fun.

So that's all there is to Thief 2014, really.
It's a stealth game, I don't like the genre, and this hasn't made me like it any more.
The graphics and immersion and atmosphere can be compelling, some of the campy cutscenes and dialogue can be entertaining, the gameplay at times can be sort of fun, but overall its pretty boring and has more dull moments than good ones, with confused awkward mechanics and controls.

5/10