Thief™ Gold

I'm generally a big fan of stealth games, but I don't see myself revisiting Thief. I appreciate what it was trying to do, the whole atmospheric first person dungeon crawl type thing, and when it could fully bring that aspect to bear, it was fantastic. However, I found that that glamor was usually (though not always) lost amid the experience of actually playing the game. Here's what it boils down to: at all but the lowest difficulty, Thief is essentially two conflicting games mashed together: a stealth game and, well, a Mario 64 type collectathon/platformer. This makes sense, as you'd expect a thief to engage in both sneaking and collecting things, but in practice what it leads to is tediously dispatching every enemy in the level so you can go around secret hunting unobstructed, making the stealth aspects go out the window. This could have been entirely mitigated if the level design was much more linear. I absolutely loved the first Sly Cooper, and that's essentially what that game was, a linear stealth collectathon game. But Thief's levels are absolutely massive with secrets hidden in obscure locations. You have to spend so much time wandering around looking for stuff that sneaking quickly becomes too much of a chore to deal with. It's a shame because the game's stealth mechanics are quite good. I appreciated how absolutely relentless and deadly the guards are compared to most other stealth games. And without the collectathon aspects, the nonlinearity would serve this gameplay well. But I feel like it's not something that should be engaged with unless the player knows the levels like the back of his hand and can beeline to where all the stuff is. That's probably the point at which the gameplay becomes fun, but for me, that's too much investment to get to that point. I still find the game quite interesting, and am willing to check out the sequel. To anyone buying this game, I'd also suggest the gold2dark mod. The new Gold Edition levels really are awful.

Game from a different time - where studios used to be creative and innovative. The graphics may seem a little outdated, but the mechanics are not. Highly recommended for anyone who's into stealth games.

It feels wrong to only award this incredible game 4 stars, but I feel I have to to validate the 5 I give its sequel, which is a timeless, amazing game. When Thief arrived, it blew me away, and I played the first few missions over and over again. But the fact is I could never bring myself to finish it. The game became infused with magic, zombies and monsters, and it lost something. I'll always be eternally grateful to Thief, it gave me such incredible inspiration, and such tense moments huddled at my monitor in the dark with my headphones on. It was the game that justified EAX, and it defined a genre. But it doesn't reach the amazing heights of its sequel, and for that, in retrospect, I have to penalize it.

This is what I hate about GoG, everyone just tells you how nostalgic games are, worthless. I chose this because of the legacy. I must admit it was shocking that this game is as old as 1998 and has such good gameplay. However it is dated, and comes with some issues. Mainly the confusing maps aren't exactly helpful, however you can type directly on them, which is a cool feature. There is a lot of exploring to do, but I found it often too stressful due to how shody it is when you encounter an enemy if they till notice you or not. You get not real visual cue that they are alerted to you being there. You have a meter to tell how noticable you are, but it is generally unhelpful, and is always up, it doesn't tell you that anyone actually hears you, just that if they could, they would or wouldn't, same with seeing you. Then they always know where you are. Forget juking them and hiding in a dark corner. The frustrating issue I most dislike is that the difficulty is extreme. Yes, I understand that you aren't meant to fight, but the combat is just awful, and the amount of hits to take a guy down is rather absurd for the first level with the easiest difficulty. That being said, carefully getting in position, hiding and blackjacking enemies is wonderfully pleasant when done right, and taking the time to explore a bit will reward you with extra goodies, but again, really only pays off once you are more familiar with the level, where enemies are, and how to avoid them. The story is solid, and the voice actor for the main character has no right being that good for 1998 when game VO mostly sucked up until 10 years later. And yes guard voices all suck. In the end, it was slow moving, but with the ability to save anytime it was fine. The first thing to do is rebind the keys as the default keys make no sense. A and D will make you turn, not strafe, and S will make you walk forward, yes, S, and jump has no keybind to start. So carefully change everything. In the end, decent.

Having read all these reviews that praise the game, one may think it is all about stealth and sneaking. A puzzle-like gameplay can be imagined, where you have multiple ways to "solve" the mission and full freedom to combine different ways. In fact, all puzzles end very quickly. After a couple of interesting sneaking missions you get into tunnels, ruins, sewers, fighting with zombies and lizards just like some weird sort of Indiana Jones and not a thief. Sometimes you will have a refreshing breath of "stealth" gameplay and a story, but while digging in the tunnels and running another lap to find the last 15 coins in another old temple you may forget how good it was that rare times. Sneaking to avoid the enemies and to not to trigger an alarm in many times doesn't worth it: the levels are designed the way where you often need to run through the same place many times. And avoiding a guard every time of 4 or 5 is really annoying. You can't have any plan to go through the mission and to plan where to spend you arsenal of arrows. To end up with sneaking, almost 1/3 of places are not sneakable: the lights cannot be turned off, two or three guards are patrolling the rooms with noisy marble floor and you don't have enough moss arrows to hide your movements. The only sneaking option you may have in this situation is to sit for few minutes, waiting for guards to go away. But if they detect you - their radars turn on: they will never lost you and will find you even if you hide in a deep shadow around two corners of a corridor. The story is short, the levels are long and lack in details, the game gives no reach gaming experience and in many places looks like a time consumer with no reward. In the end it turns into what it tried to not to be: into a strange first-person "fencing and shooting" with rare sneaking elements. I've bought it in a bundle so I'll try next games in Thief trilogy, but won't ever return to Thief Gold again.