Garrett is the best the City has ever seen, able to hide almost in plain sight and skilled with a carefully selected toolset there is no mansion, lockhouse or temple safe from his taking ways. But when ancient prophecies portend ominious times ahead Garrett himself may well be taken as the forces of change gather to alter the City in ways it may not survive. The Unwritten Times are almost upon us...

Marble floors invariably mean expensive loot to swipe!

Thief is a venerable series started by the well respected and now sadly demised Looking Glass Studios. The first game, Thief: The Dark Project, not only introduced us to the world where magic and steam-punk technology uneasily co-exist but it also ushered in the concept of stealth based gameplay. It was the first first-person shooter that actively de-emphasised the shooter aspect to become its own genre - the first-person sneaker. Here the goal wasn't to kill your enemies, but rather bypass them by distracting or knocking out them out and hiding the unconscious body where other guards wouldn't find it. This was quite a revolution and directly lead to the rise of stealth-oriented segments in other FPS games.

As if creating an entirely new form of gameplay weren't enough, the game was the first in a planned trilogy with each episode adding to the larger story. The first chronicled the rise of the pagans and their god leader, the Trickster. The second game, Thief: The Metal Age, brought the Hammerites into the highlight showing the machinations of a splinter group of these fanatical clerics who believe in technology and building. Aiding and guiding Garrett, much to his annoyance, through these trials were the Keepers - a secretive order who once accepted Garrett as a trainee and who work from behind the scenes to maintain a balance between the Pagan & Hammerite forces.

It has been their seldom-seen influence that has helped the City to persist for as long as it has. The Keepers saw the heights a predecessor civilisation reached in the ruins the City was built on and sagely realised both the power and the danger of it. Their path has been to carefully guide the City's development using the knowledge gained from studying these ruins. The second game closed with the Keepers finally coming forward to share some of the warnings their prophecies held for the future leaving us on a huge cliff hanger ending.

Your mechanical right eye not only has a zoom mode
but it also offers light night vision too. Very handy.

Ion Storm Austin had awfully big shoes to fill when it announced it had accquired the rights to produce the third game in the series from the remains of Looking Glass Studios. To their credit they hired a lot of the original team who worked on the first two games and who had begun work on the third game before the studio closed. As a result a strong design and story continuity came over, which is reflected in the game they delivered. For fans of the series, you can be relieved - this is very definitely a Thief game. Indeed fans need to get the game if only to see the story through to its conclusion.

Some of the building exteriors are quite pretty.
Just beware the patrolling guard who carries a torch.

So what does a Thief game entail? Well like its predecessors the emphasis is very much on using a toolset to circumvent a variety of AI opponents who are between you and the loot you wish to garner. Each AI has a well modeled set of senses where they can see and hear you. Progress through the game is by using the darkness, where you are hardest to see, and moving slowly so you make the least noise to let you get into position. Some AI can't be knocked out, others are nigh on indestructible so learning to exploit your talents for avoiding attention are key. Indeed the essence of the game is this delicious balance of tension where you try to move between the safe pockets of darkness. Where the game gets most tense is when an AI is aware something is there and begins actively searching for you - start drawing up contingency plans for dealing with this as they can and do find you.

Once inside you often see the guards doing things to relieve
the boredom. Here two were playing a game on the table.

Complicating your life is the extra awareness the AI has at higher difficulty levels, they will notice doors being left open, torches going out (usually thanks to your judicious application of a water arrow), treasure going missing, chairs being knocked out of position and generally a much better world awareness than any previous Thief game managed. The AI is largely left to its own devices and it is sufficiently good that a lot of emergent behavior comes out so that no two plays of the game work out in quite the same way. When all this works well the game is most impressive with guards running to fetch colleagues to help, unarmed people leaving the scene of fights and some quite amusing conversations as guards co-operate in searching for you. It adds to a fun sense of satisfaction when you pull off a plan succesfully and leave the poor fool puzzling over where the gold he was guarding went.

This balcony is being lit by lightning from a storm outside.
These bright flashes occasionally make sneaking around very tricky.

But it also can often show its limitations, too. Periodically, AI will get caught on trivial obstacles or engage in fairly self-destructive behaviour - such as guards accidentally stabbing cohorts which then results in a frantic free-for-all melee - which is both a good and bad thing from the AI standpoint. Generally, though the AI is very impressive in how flexible and expressive it is. AI will regularly talk about where they think you are hiding, how serious they thought what they detected was as well as general comments about the task they are performing or City life. One of the other nice new touches to the series is the unscripted AI conversations where two AI will sight each other and have short conversations greeting each other. Quite often these are very funny as guards and civilians will have grumpy little exchanges and mutter under their breath about each other.

The bump mapping used in game makes for some very attractive scenes.

All in all the AI is a pleasure to interact with when you have it at Expert levels. Sadly the lower AI levels get a little too stupid for our tastes, rendering the game a bit too easy. Thief purists will already find the game too easy as one game balance change from the prequels is that guards are now always able to be killed. We actually regard this as a good thing in general as it lets the less skilled players continue through the game while the more fastidious thief can still play to the 'no kills' rule if he chooses.

Also changed is the toolset Garrett can utilise. While the core elemental arrows (water, gas, fire and moss), broadhead arrows, flashbomb, holy water, blackjack, explosive mines and health potions remain, the rest of the toolset has changed a bit. Rope arrows have been replaced by climbing gloves that let you climb any stone surface. These have caused some consternation amongst fans but this is largely an overstated worry in our opinion.

While the climbing gloves are not quite as flexible in gameplay terms as the rope arrows they still let you perform many a sneaky maneuver past guards and obstacles. In many ways they made us feel more like the super thief as we snuck up the side of a building looking for a good vantage point to observe the guards patrol pattern. Perhaps the most deliciously fun addition is the oil flasks which when thrown lay down a slippery oil slick that causes any moving person to slip and slide through them, often falling over. Better yet, they can be set alight as well serving as temporary burning barrier preventing pursuit. The evil combinations these permit like slicking staircases to deadly effect or combining an oil slick with an explosive mine allow for the creative thief to get quite artisticly expressive in how he deals with his foe.

No thief game would be complete without raiding
someone's throne room!

So while the tools have changed a bit the core essence of the gameplay - using this limited toolset to overcome the guards between you and your objectives - remains in spades. Perhaps the biggest change of all is the new rendering engine the game uses. Expanding on the work done for Deus Ex : Invisible War the same engine has been refined and tweaked some more giving the most dynamic Thief environment yet. With all lights and shadows calculated in realtime it becomes possible to stack objects to create hiding spaces of shadow. Or use another guard's shadow and, pacing him carefully, slip past an exceedingly well-lit area. Best yet, while the rendering technology is all new the look and feel of the previous games has been kept whilst also being significantly improved. This is the best-looking game in the series and no slouch graphically compared to many other titles available currently.

You can even get down to the Docks where the ships
sometimes carry interesting loot.

This does come at a cost, though. First it requires some pretty hefty hardware to power it. The Radeon 9800 pro we used to test the game on coped but was producing framerates between 25-50 per second. (Admittedly we did have Vsync on which is pulling this a little low but then we want the game to look its best when playing.) We strongly suggest that you download the demo of the game and try it on your computer before purchasing. The demo is very reflective of the full game's rendering demands.

Second is the level size restrictions. Thanks to the slow pace of the game and the expanded size of the levels over Deus Ex: Invisible War, this isn't too much of an annoyance but it does mean most missions are split into two segments that moving between requires 20-30 seconds of load time. That isn't too disruptive but where it can get annoying is in the City segments of the game. Between missions you are allowed to move around the City in a freeform fashion both thieving as you see fit, doing occasional side missions and visiting the various fences you know to restock your inventory of tools.

This adds greatly to giving the City a sense of place but the City is also broken into segments so that often you have to trudge across two or three loading zones to achieve what the game requires of you. This can get a little tedious at times if you view the game purely as a linear trudge from mission to mission. Engaging in a little larceny en-route usually spices things up enough and we must admit getting to see the various districts previous games have simply talked about but never shown was quite a pleasure in itself.

One of the simplest graphical touches that adds a lot of ambience is
the dust motes floating in the moonlight streaming in the windows.

Perhaps the most serious imbalance the City sections give is that thanks to the constant respawning occuring in these segments it can become easy to become very flush with money through mugging people and as a result extremely well-stocked with equipment. While there are upper limits on what you can carry, most thieves will find themselves stocked to those limits for each mission. Experienced thieves will find this a little bit of a detraction as the need for every arrow shot to count and hit its mark is lessened somewhat. By the same token this again allows the less experienced thieves to make mistakes and recover from them gracefully, something we consider to be a good thing in allowing more people to experience the gameplay on offer. It helps that the limits on what can be carried are sufficiently low that you can't go wild even when fully stocked.

What is without reservation a straight improvement over the original games is the audio work in the game. Able to establish an ambience and sense of menace through sound alone, the audio work in this game is superb. Generally very strong voice acting is accentuated with the distinctive Thief soundscapes that makes for an enthralling experience. Hearing zombies wheezing and groaning as they look for you is enough to make you want to avoid them, let alone the noises some of the later enemies make. Those players with Creative Audigy sound cards are in for an especial treat as this game makes heavy use of the multiple sound environment capabilities of that card to properly echo and distort sound. As with previous games, sound flows through the levels and can, based on how it is reaching your ears within the game, often come from a different direction as it bounces around the levels. Those with 5.1 speaker setups will particularly enjoy it as the game makes good use of them, allowing you to track movement of AIs through sound alone.

Finally, the best bit of the game is the story it unfolds. Taking you from zombie-infested ships to Keeper libraries you uncover exactly what the threat of the Unwritten Times is about and once again are reluctantly called to save the City. It all culminates in an ending that Thief fans should be well happy with as Garrett's tale comes to a satisfying conclusion. A mix of the slightly surreal cutscenes akin to earlier games, some engine based cutscenes and a variety of in game conversations & writings deliver this story as you explore. Often your reward for exploring a dark corner or quiet pocket of the City is to find more information about the world in general. Be it a little sidequest of nobles scheming against each other or more background on the goals of the various factions within the City there is rich amount of detail to be plumbed.