I thought I would share my impressions that I posted over on QT3 a few weeks ago. This game is all over the place. I finished a ghost run on Master Thief difficulty with most of the ui switched off. It's a massive, generous game that plays like it was rushed out the door. When it works, it can be enjoyable but it has too many bugs, design flaws and questionable decisions to recommend to anyone but desperate stealth fans. Thief is a broken, tragic, rewritten mess of a game. The plot has clearly been reworked multiple times. The Baron and Orion standing in for the Mechanists and Pagans respectively, is fine on paper but it doesn't work in execution. Since they have barely any screen time, they have to scream their motivations to the player in an awkward, rushed manner. Erin feels like a holdover from an earlier iteration of the game, when it was a straight sequel to Deadly Shadows. The Thief Taker General is hilarious. I love it when he happens to find Garrett, who has just returned from a trek through a long forgotten ruin, underneath his bed at the brothel. I like the idea of Garrett having an antagonist but TTG is just awful. A bald, mustachioed villain who walks with a limp, drops f-bombs like a desperate comic, kills his underlings over trivial matters (so you know he's bad!) and has a crossbow affixed to his arm. There's way too much going on here. He feels like a one of the grotesque characters from Hitman: Absolution. Why Eidos Montreal thought he would be a good choice for the Thief universe is baffling. The sound-mixing is atrocious. The worst I've ever heard in a blockbuster game. That's not hyperbole. It's broken. Sound cuts out frequently, guards across a courtyard sound like their yelling into the players ear, npcs yell ambient dialogue over Basso repeatedly during cutscenes, and Garrett's voice actor frequently pauses to his read lines. The lip-syncing is horrid. I really miss the sound propagation from the earlier titles. Unless you're walking on glass or water, it's doesn't matter where you walk, Garrett won't make a sound. There are some really cool additions including blunt arrows (must-have for all future Thief games), some instances of impressive a.i. (noticing open safes, lights switching off etc...), knocking over bottles, real-world alarms (birds, dogs), the lockpicking game making a noise when you fail. It's quite enjoyable, but not without reservations. Some of the best parts of the game are undermined by, I suspect, poor play testing. After cracking a safe in tailors shop, Garrett refused to stop examining the silly earring he just nabbed. The animation was unskippable, so when the guard rounded the corner, I didn't have time to shut the safe, and he went on alert. Not cool. While the city looks gorgeous, its pretty much empty. The sidequests are neat, but most of the time I'm just exploring an vacant apartment; no one's home. If I mess up the lockpicking or set off a trap 9 times out of 10 it doesn't matter. All these cool additions to the game are underused. Also, there's so many loading zones! Enter a one room apartment. Pick up a letter opener and a ring. Leave in under 20 seconds. Load for just as much. This content just slows the game down. Then there's a lack of abilities and gadgets. I like Swoop, but it's basically a grounded Blink and the rest of Garrett's abilities are essentially uniquely skinned door-openers. Garrett's movement has a nice heft to it. He feels present. But moving through the world is about working out exactly what the designer wants you to do, not using your instincts or experimenting. If a rope arrow is just out of reach, don't bother trying to grab it. You need to look for a crate, or a ladder or a walk way to reach it. It's a discrete puzzle that was made for that specific instance. I wish it was like Assassin's Creed or Mirror's Edge. Instead it's an awkward compromise that isn't particularly enjoyable. Unlike Dishonored, where the designers have a set of rules that you can rely upon, Thief is about instances: These guards will patrol in this pattern no matter what. This object can be leaned around, while another identical space cannot. You can climb this crate, but not this one. Such a frustrating game! It doesn't have the same love Eidos Montreal had for Deus Ex. That team got the brand. Thief doesn't play like the rest of the series. That's fine. It's been a decade since Deadly Shadows. Time moves on. But Dishonored is Thief's competition and that game, as a stealth adventure, did a better job in every respect of capturing the essence of Thief. Thief plays like it was made in 18 months. It simply wasn't ready. I hope they get the opportunity to take a long look at what happened here, evaluate and take another stab at the licence. I'm really looking forward to reading a post-mortem on the game. On a podcast, Eurogamer writer Simon Parkin mentions he was told by Eidos Montreal team members that the game was rushed out the door. It certainly plays that way. http://www.gamingdai...e-in-lampposts/ - 31:00