The game will let you play as a vampire in a vampire clan and it desperately tries to please everyone so it is a dark game at one moment only to be very cringy the next one. There are plenty of non-essential dialogues which you won't care about at all if are not crazy about vampires. It is a well produced game but I guess it is really just for people who love anything with vampires. Casual players will be quickly bored.
First of all this is Van Helsing's story who is chasing Dracula all over the world and it is an outstanding mix between serious and lighthearted. I laughed when someone tried to poison Van Helsing's camel in order to bar him from reaching another location and noone wanted to rent him another one so first he had to find a cure for the sick camel. There is much more of this kind of subtle bittersweet humour but there are suprisingly also quite dark moments. I really like Van Helsing's voice acting that adds to this ambiguity. He is just very cool in this one. The difficulty of the puzzles is mostly just right and you won't get lost because the game won't let you leave the area before everything needed for the progression is done. The game won't even let you to solve a puzzle that is at the time unsolveable (if you miss something). You can also press spacebar and see all the possible interactions. So no boring backtracking. That is a good thing. It is a really good system, everything goes in a logical order which saves your time and nerves. Just remember to inspect everything and only when Van Helsing writes it down in his notebook it is inspected (if there is an "eye" icon just always click on it).
The gameplay is generally one of the most important aspects in a game and especially in a game like Thief. The movement in Thief 3 is unfortunately broken. Forget the smooth movement like in Thief 1 and 2. In Thief 3 the movement is just painfully bad and nothing solves this issue. You usually have at most one clunky mechanic in a game like "moon jumping" for instance but in Thief 3 nearly every game mechanic is terrible. Opening door is weird, pick-pocketing is almost impossible, jumping, crouching, walking.... take your pick because everything is here. You will get this feeling the game is going to break at any moment and you will fall through the floor and fly all over the map.
The game has good graphics, music, story and atmosphere but there are just too many annoying design flaws that ruin it and even make it quite frustrating experience: - the game is too long for all the bad reasons - incredibly tedious pedling between locations (no fast travel) - you will regulary cross 4 and more screens - long animations before dialogues - slow movement of the main character - often slow and subpar voice acting - some redundant and weird puzzles - story progression activated by certain dialogues - you can die or even worse there is at least one gamebreaking situation (wolf) - out of nowhere one of the worst puzzles in the history of the adventure games (the second tomb) - pixel hunting (you will often miss some item) - confusing controls (for some strange reason sometimes you have to click with the right mouse button instead of the standard left mouse button for the action)
First of all, graphically the game looks still very appealing, the music and the voice acting in the game are also really good. The story is not too interesting though and you play for some guy you know nothing about apart from the fact he was sentenced for the murder of his wife and son. The gameplay becomes after an hour very repetitive partly because of the bulletsponge enemies (medium difficulty) and partly because of the lack of more diverse enviroments (it takes place mostly in the prison areas and it gets soon old). It is an ok above average game that I wanted badly when it was released but I would not rate it too high nowadays.
It is a good game but it gets soon claustrophobic, repetitive and boring. Once you have seen level 1 you have seen them all and there are like 7 levels. It looks like a difficult game at first but soon you will realize it is just a simple shooter that forces you to search everything to get a new gun, ammo or a healthkit which is after a while just annoying routine. It is not that interesting to explore the ship. From that era I would recommend Realms of Hauntig instead. That offers more fun with more variety of levels and a much better story.
