Thief: Deadly Shadows

The UK Cowboy said:

Unless its been 'dumbed down' ala Deux ex2

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The UK Cowboy said:

Unless its been 'dumbed down' ala Deux ex2

Click to expand...

gamespy said:

Among the many rules and bits of wisdom handed down at game reviewing university, one of the most important is this: Never, ever admit ignorance. As a game reviewer, your job is to be an unquestionable authority, a minor diety whose sacrosanct opinion is the result of mighty deliberation and profound insight. So I'm going to start this review off on the wrong foot by mentioning that I've never really played the first two Thief games. I know a fair deal about them, sure, but never did get around to taking the plunge. However, most Xbox gamers are going to be in the same boat. Bereft of all the baggage that comes from being a long-time Thief fan, perhaps I can offer some useful insights into how appealing of a transition Thief: Deadly Shadows makes onto Xbox.

Deadly Shadows throws you back into the role of Garrett, a master thief who's heavy on stealth and light on morals. Despite his best efforts, Garrett always ends up being the pawn of the Keepers, a secret society that rules the game's nameless, medieval City and strives to maintain balance between the wily, nature-worshipping Pagans and the dogmatic Hammerites, a cult that has made technology into a religion. As the game begins, a shadowy conflict is brewing within these disparate groups, and the Keepers prophesize that a new dark age is at hand. Can a thief once again change the course of history? Well, of course. The question is whether you'll want to pay $50 for the privilege of helping him do so.

Medieval Capers


He won't know what hit him.

If you like stealth gameplay, then Deadly Shadows delivers a pretty decent implementation of it. (What else would you expect from the respected Thief series?) The AI is good, though not quite spectacular. Guards will notice things like missing items and open doors, and will investigate as they deem fit. If they should discover you, your best bet is to run. Garrett may or may not be a good lover, but he's certainly no fighter. Surprisingly, it's relatively easy to throw pursuing guards off your trail, so getting caught comes to feel more annoying than dangerous. You can't knock out an alerted guard, so much time is spent waiting for them to go back to their patrols.

The game starts off with two linear missions but then sets you loose in the City. At first these segments feel like relatively pointless filler, but they become more interesting a bit later, when the streets fill with enemies and you get actual objectives to accomplish within them. The City also offers exits into the various mission sites, including a castle, a church, a haunted ship, a sunken temple, a clock tower, and many more. Throughout, the level design and architecture are strong, if sometimes confusing to navigate. The only things really missing are secrets. I imagined that the game would be full of secret passages and such, but most "secret" loot items are placed in the regular environment, and are merely hard to see.


He didn't know what hit him.

Given the emphasis on stealth, it can take upwards of an hour to play any one mission ... and that doesn't count reloads. The good news is that you can save anywhere. The bad news is that you'll probably want to (or have to, if you die) reload constantly, and the load times are a hefty 20-30 seconds. During many reload-heavy sequences, I was praying for a PC-esque "quickload" button, or better yet, shorter load times. The menus aren't very well-designed, either, which adds that little extra annoyance to saving or loading.

A larger problem, though, is that Deadly Shadows becomes repetitive. Once you master sneaking about and knocking out foes from behind, there isn't much more to learn. Rather than new types of challenges, new levels simply offer different visuals and more foes to knock out. One welcome exception is the haunted ship, which is filled with near-invincible zombies that can only be killed with some very scarce weapons. As a result, you actually have to sneak past most of them instead of going for the KO. The game could use more creative scenarios like this. As it is, a difficulty selection offers a little relief from this sense of repetition, but only by making Garrett's life much harder, and not through any gameplay enhancements.


They won't know what hit them ... if they ever shut up and disperse.

Deadly Shadows runs on the same tweaked-out Unreal technology that powered Deus Ex: Invisible War, and that means three things: it looks weird, the lighting is great, and the framerate is shoddy. The character modeling is competent but not very attractive, sort of like the NPCs in Morrowind. I often had to zoom in with Garrett's mechanical eye to determine if a medium to long-range character was looking my way or not. Worse are the animations, which are jittery and stilted. The textures are also an odd lot. Some surfaces look extremely vivid, riddled with shadow-catching bumps and divots. Other textures are rather drab, often in the same scene as the good-looking ones. Toss in an amazing lighting and shadowing engine and you have one very strange-looking melange of a game.

However, the worst offense is probably the inconsistent framerate. It's always playable, but boy, in some scenes it sure isn't smooth. Given the problems some players had with the framerate of Invisible War, I was hoping for better from Deadly Shadows. Insult's added to injury when you notice the terrible horizontal shearing every time you turn. This common Xbox problem is out in full force in Deadly Shadows.

Stolen Potential

I found Thief: Deadly Shadows more fun than not, but the repetitive nature and framerate problems dampened my enjoyment. I couldn't help feeling that it was a PC game slapped on a console. The pokey turning rate, long load times and saving/loading blues would be mostly or fully solved on the series' native platform. The Xbox version of Thief: Deadly Shadows is a decent console port of what I understand to be a somewhat better-executed PC game. That said, it's worth a play if you like stealth gameplay and don't mind playing the second-best version.

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