Ceremony
How I choose to feel is how I am
- Jun 8, 2012
- 114,296
- 17,376
Thief (PS3, 2014)
Usually when I finish a game or a book it takes me a few days before I can write about it on here. I tried writing about one of the last books I read right away and it just didn't work. I don't know what it is or why this happens since I've mentioned before that when I do write something I invariably finish and remember a bunch of stuff I wanted to say but in this case, I've spent so long playing Thief and it's so, so bad and somehow shallow that I don't think I'll have anything to worry about.
When I finished playing Dishonored I remember wanting to play something else with stealth in it. I went back to Hitman 2 which was perhaps not the best decision. For about, oh, twenty seconds of Thief I thought it would have been a much better choice. Now, not so much. Never mind a choice for a stealth game, this was just a bad life choice. Thief is a game in which you, Garrett, are in a city and have to do stuff. It's fascinating.
I have to start with the map. I suppose you could describe the game as open world, but it isn't. It's set in The City, a sort of central hub world with an assortment of locations where you can enter and steal stuff, usually with something specific to target. While I can't remember every game I've played offhand and wouldn't want to speak for all of them, this is the worst map I've ever seen in a game. Even leaving aside the fact that the colour palette is non-existent and everything looks the same, there's never any knowing where you're supposed to go or how you're supposed to get there. There are eight chapters in the game and each has a different start point on the map. Fair enough, except you can't set a custom waypoint in the pause menu to make it easier to know where you're going. The mini-map is, for some reason, able to be toggled on and off. And for some other reason, the default is off. It was about twelve hours before I realised I could do that. It was about another twelve hours after that I was able to use it to any sort of advantage.
Rather than a normal sort of open world map where you can look at the top down view of it and see streets or paths or things like that there are various layers to Thief's maps which are only ever viewable when you happen to be on it. So if you're on the street your map will be different from your map when you're on a roof. Which may be the only way to get to the area you need to go to. And since it's all so dark you probably wouldn't be able to see it anyway. In cases where the way past a seemingly uninteractable building facade isn't up a roof or hiding somewhere it exists purely as a loading screen to go from one area to another. The map isn't big. From the main area you start in you could walk from the top to the bottom in maybe two or three minutes, assuming you aren't spotted by a guard. Yet it's split up into two different main areas and several others within those areas, and there's always a loading screen between each of them. Occasionally you have to go through a thing I haven't seen since about 2008, frantically pressing a button to lift a beam out of the way or something.
I said there are various parts of the map you can interact with. Stuff like windows you can open to get into rooms that have traps or puzzles in them. Fine. You know how in GTA you can walk into a building by opening a door? In Thief you'll be in front of a window you can open. You press square, there's a 5 second animation of him looking at the window, then you need to keep pressing square until it's opened. Then you go into the room for five seconds, and they all looks the same, and on the way out you need to do it again. I don't understand how a game as recently made as this and with such a dull, uninteresting, immobile base world can be so poorly made. The loading times are massive. I don't know if it was optimised better on the PS4 and Xbone or something (I should f***ing hope it was) but my god, you don't stop noticing it. And there's just the constant sense that it's not getting you anywhere.
I don't understand how anyone involved in this game's creation could look at the map and think it was good. I don't know how they could play the game at any point and think the means of getting around was logical, or engaging, or in any way comparable to anything they'd ever played before. Look at the mini-map, it tells you that the area you want to go to is right in front of you. You can't go into it though because there's a beam you have to fire a rope arrow at (if you have any) hidden away above you somewhere. f***ing magnificent. Want to replay a chapter? Well you'll have to remember where it is, because we're not telling you. You can replay chapters assuming you know where it is on the map because there's literally no indication anywhere that it's a thing which is possible. I don't understand how people can be happy putting their name to a game which is made in this way. It's as if they tried to make it as unintuitive and deliberately off-putting as possible.
It would be one thing for me to say that the story is boring and unengaging and I would have done, only in finishing the trophies I was able to garner a vague idea of what it's about. Garrett has a sidekick who gets caught in an experiment of some sort by some old men with something called the Primal and you spend the game trying to fix that. The thing is though, none of the cutscenes ever seem to be as a consequence of anything you've done. You go where the game tells you to go and you find whatever it is it's telling you to find but it may as well show clips from Fantasia in the interim. None of the characters are remotely interesting or engaging. Even despite its visceral terribleness and how recently I played it I only vaguely remember what went on.
In fact I can give you a great example of how disengaging the story is, and of course it comes back to the map. There are guards walking around the city because there's a revolt of some sort going on. Fine, so they're trying to stop you because you're infiltrating all these places and stealing stuff. But then as the game goes on this other faction, the Graven, start taking over and purging the normal guards. And they react to you in the street in exactly the same way, despite the fact you're working for their leader. And of course walking around the streets is a crapshoot anyway since pedestrians don't notice you and try to chase you, only the outfits of the characters are all so dull and similar you'll struggle to notice. And very often you're forced to be on the streets because of how badly the map's designed, so unless you want to spend half an hour just getting to each chapter you'd better hope you're playing on an easy difficulty so you don't get killed when you get bored and just run past everyone. Until after about ten seconds of sprinting your stamina gives out and you can't run any more. Oh and of all the things you can upgrade, you can't upgrade that.
The gameplay is one of the few things I will praise. For about half an hour in the last two chapters on the highest difficulty, with no focus (ie the magic blue vision that shows you where everything is) and with no freedom to kill people, I had fun. Trying to work out the proper stealth way to get through a level and pulling it off, that was brilliant. Very satisfying. Especially finding a way to get past the birds in cages which started wailing if you moved past them, that was great. It did take me about forty hours to get to this point though, so you'd better get used to shooting people with your crossbow. That in itself isn't bad and killing people silently is still a challenge, but it's not memorable. You will want to shoot people from afar, because if you're forced into face-to-face combat you'll die from laughing too much at how bad the combat is.
I don't know what else there is for me to say about this game but it's strange in that there's so little to it yet so much of it which is, for lack of a better word, bad. The story is forgettable, the characters unengaging, the map impossibly unplayable, the gameplay on the whole boring and, really overall quite a short experience assuming you don't play it for fifty hours for trophies like me. I know that previous Thief games are highly thought of and maybe there's reason for that. But this one...
... I just remembered one of those things I nearly forgot. There are various collectibles in the game. Fine. There are "secret areas," dotted around the map and in chapters. 73 in total. Unlike all the other quite detailed collectibles, there's no trace of how many you've found in any of the menus. So if you want to get the trophy/achievement for finding them all you'd better get a guide and keep track of every one. That of course is a shit way of playing a game, even one as bad as this. But for the low low price of 99p you can buy the Thief smartphone app which tells you how many you've found! It doesn't offer anything else worthwhile and doesn't even tell you whereabouts you've found each area like every other collectible listing in the game does, but apparently this game didn't fill you with enough buyer's remorse.
Oh! Another thing I forgot. I mentioned that the cutscenes don't seem to have any bearing on what you've done, well, the chief bad guy is someone called the Thief-Taker General, whose sole purpose in life seems to be catching Garrett. He's not very good at it, even though he looks like this:
The twirly moustache, the inexplicable bald spot, the big wart on his nose, the peg leg - it's bizarre. Even more bizarre is the fact that of the game's eight chapters (at least four I can think of) end with you running away from this guy who just happened to turn up at the end. Absurd doesn't do it justice.
Thematically, stylistically and creatively this game feels like a very poor attempt at being Dishonored. It's a bad copy of that and a bad game in itself with nearly every aspect of it being poorly executed to such an extent you would find better gameplay aspects in titles from completely unrelated genres. It's bad when compared to anything else, it's worse when viewed solely on its own merits.
