Thief Reviews
Eidos Montreal's smartly designed reboot will pilfer dozens of hours of your free time – and you'll wish it would take more.
Thief shows one too many unrefined edges, occasionally catching itself unable to resolve the issue combining classic design with modern production. That said, although it won't steal the spotlight, it should do enough to steal your attention.
While the game does have its faults - particularly falling apart when Garrett is spotted - Thief excels in the shadows as a pure stealth title, becoming increasingly enjoyable as your skills improve.
Despite its slow and dreary start, Thief builds to deliver an experience that most stealth fans will lap up. However, most Thief fans will mourn the loss of the reboot's freedom and choice. That said, Thief is ultimately a game that delivers epic highs and mediocre lows, and for the highs alone, I have no issues recommending it to anyone.
A prolonged development has not been kind to this reboot of the classic Thief series, making for a game stitched together from disparate parts of better contemporaries.
Thief offers up moments of stealthy satisfaction, but not nearly enough of them to make up for its many rough edges, bland level designs, and god-awful plot.
Series fans may view it as a disaster but the problem is that Thief isn't even interesting enough to get angry about, despite the well hewn stealth gameplay.
Thief will almost certainly frustrate fans of the older trilogy, but it suffers shortcomings on a more objective level as well. Though solidly made, it never challenges the well-worn conventions of stealth action. In short, it lacks a certain spark of inspiration. It's good, yet it falls short of "future classic" status.
At times the game suffers from a lack of ambition, placing far too much importance on the tiresome looting of endless cupboards and dressers in the vain hope that this will be enough to propel you forwards. In other places, Thief suffers from too much ambition, unable to draw its systems into a cohesive whole. Whether the game simply needed more time or entirely different foundations is never quite clear. Either way, it's a game that adds up to less than the sum of its parts.
At its best, Thief makes you feel like a devious outlaw. Sadly, such moments are too few.
The elements of a better game never come together in Thief
Despite my disappointment with Thief's setting and story, I did enjoy my time with it. Sneaking about, pickpocketing guards, picking locks, and finding new ways to infiltrate a building are as satisfying as ever, and the game looks and sounds great (despite some janky audio mixing). As a longtime fan of the series, I want to believe a spot exists for Garrett in the current stealth-action genre he helped create. And if one doesn't? Well, he'll probably just wind up stealing one anyway.
I wanted so much for Thief to be fun, and in the beginning I did have a lot of fun with it. But, due to no sense of impact in the story and its unrewarding gameplay, it degraded into a chore well before the final act. While playing Thief I couldn't help but feel like I'd done this all before, and often in a better setting. Thief may be a throwback to the early days of stealth games, but this reboot really feels aged and dated. While there is some fun to be had, you will have to sift through a mess of problems to find it. Now, this is the part where I insert the obligatory "Thief didn't manage to steal my heart" line, right?
It's not exactly a perfect run for Garrett, but players will still find many things worth taking.
