The last high-profile sequel we saw from Austin-based studio Ion Storm was last year's Deus Ex: Invisible War, harshly thumped by some critics for taking the original game's tasty blend of action, story and role-playing and dumbing it down for a parallel release on the PC and Xbox.
Invisible War wasn't a bad game at all. It was just a lot different from what some old-school Deus Ex fans were expecting. So it was with no small amount of grumbling and nail-biting that fans of 1998's stellar Thief: The Dark Project and its 2000 sequel Thief II: The Metal Age were awaiting this new take on a venerable and much-loved franchise.
The good news is Thief: Deadly Shadows has all the spirit and atmosphere of the previous Thief games, putting you once again in the leather boots of cynical master thief Garrett as he plunders the idle rich and gets drawn into another complex web of medieval intrigue.
The original Thief practically gave birth to the so-called stealth-action genre, in which silently sticking to the shadows and avoiding head-on combat is the order of the day. Deadly Shadows continues this tradition, with Garrett's primary modus operandi being to hide in darkness (the game's real-time light and shadow effects are fairly impressive) and take out foes with a swing of his blackjack or a well-aimed arrow.
The game begins slowly and simply, but the plot soon gets surprisingly more involved and always ties in nicely with the game's plentiful missions. As with the previous titles in the series, Garrett's world isn't exactly rooted in reality, and he'll eventually confront non-human enemies (and allies) and otherworldly locales as his loyalty gets tested by the warring factions that wield power behind the scenes.
New to Deadly Shadows is the ability to sell stolen loot and buy equipment, ranging from clockwork landmines to a variety of specialized arrow types (although rope arrows have been done away with in favour of significantly less cool Spidey-like wall-climbing gloves.) Some fans might dig Deadly Shadows' new third-person perspective, although the game can still be played entirely in the first-person mode.
In a bid to make things more free-form and open-ended, Garrett can now skulk around his home turf at will between missions, looking for crimes of opportunity and picking up clues for short side quests. While "the City" is actually quite small ("the Village" doesn't have quite the same ring to it, unless you're Patrick McGoohan), it does open up another welcome facet of the game.
One thing Deadly Shadows does have in common with Invisible War is its oddly demanding graphics engine, which chugs on even a mid-range PC with the detail settings dialed up - and these ain't Far Cry graphics we're talking about. The Xbox version of the game can run a little more smoothly, due mainly to its lower resolution, but the load times are longer and it's still by no means silky. And like Invisible War, the game's environments are carved up into smaller chunks with load zones between them, although you won't do nearly as much back-and-forth travelling between them in this game.
While it doesn't do anything truly revolutionary in terms of graphics or gameplay, Thief: Deadly Shadows is still very much a spiritual successor to the previous Thief games, and is well worth stealing if you enjoyed the originals. And by stealing, we mean buying. Know when to draw the line between video games and the real world, kids.
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BOTTOMLINE
Longtime Thief fans who can overlook the game's handful of flaws will find Deadly Shadows a worthwhile continuation of the series, even though some sacrifices were made to bring it to the PC and Xbox platforms simultaneously. And why didn't they just call it Thief III?
