Thief: Deadly Shadows Review

Ambitious accessibility

Any notions that Ion Storm has sold the brand out, however, are quickly dispelled once the first couple of missions are out of the way. If anything, Thief: Deadly Shadows is simultaneously the most ambitious stealth game ever made, while also being perhaps the most genuinely accessible.

As a veteran of both Splinter Cell campaigns and most of the MGS series, it's fair to say that those titles require a degree of patience and resolve that most games would never dare to ask of you. If anything, we were expecting Thief's transition to console to be even more of an exacting exercise in observation and guile - but some cunning design decisions have largely circumvented a large proportion of the frustration inherent in games that demand that you lurk in the shadows and creep around playing hide and seek.

Unlike the resolutely linear experience of, Splinter Cell, Thief offers a far more flexible gameplay experience, often presenting you with several tasks or missions at once. Although the overall direction is still most definitely linear by necessity, there's still a heartening feeling of choice available to you. The game works essentially by placing you within a town and then gradually offering new missions at locations around the town. It's not exactly stealth GTA, but it's most definitely a progression from just hopping from level to level in that you're given a number of other optional things to in between the 'real' missions that often distract you from the main task at hand for hours at a time.

Eavesdrop away

Listening in on conversations can, for example, bring up all new sub mission tasks, while carefully infiltrating all the myriad of nooks and crannies available can often provide explicit clues to booty stashes, not to mention their state of mind. What isn't necessarily obvious at first is the almost subliminal storytelling going on; either in the form of snatches of conversation or the numerous journal entries scattered around that add a layer of depth to what might otherwise feel like your typical hide and sneak.

With the all-new third person mode added, there's even more reason to draw comparisons with the Splinter Cells of this world. At first glance it uses a lot of the same tricks; the thumb stick lock pick system is perhaps the most instantly recognisable comparison, or the delicious use of dynamic lighting, shadow and sound. At its heart the core gameplay admittedly works in almost the same way, but after that you're left reflecting on some very big differences that make you love the game the more you play it. To begin with, you can become obsessed with the light. The first proper mission, for example, makes you shoot out a flaming torch with a Water Arrow, and from then on it became an obsession to black out the levels in the same way as Splinter Cell demands - only a paucity of arrows meant resorting to other tactics became a functional necessity when it became apparent that you rarely have enough cash to justify profligacy.

By shoehorning you into taking other routes to your goal, you soon realise just how many options there are available to you. If you want to sneak, it's very often not just a case of waiting for the right moment, but also taking the right route. It's quite common for you to struggle through to your destination, only to discover there was a far easier and more cunning way to get there that may have entirely avoided any conflict at all. You can, of course, take a more violent approach to your thievery and leave a succession of corpses strewn around the town, and Thief offers a multitude of means if you so wish to play the game this way.

Those deadly penny chews

The most obvious method we came across was to simply whack opponents over the back of the head with a Blackjack, before dumping their limp torsos in darkened corners, but in addition you have a dagger, numerous bombs - notably the Gas bomb, which knocks out a gaggle of foe in one hit, or the Oil bomb, which causes the AI to skid in a slapstick fashion before knocking themselves unconscious. The arrows, however, provide plenty of options to help you gain a sizeable booty stash, with the flaming arrow providing a great incendiary attack near barrels of oil, the water arrow a great dousing ally against the peril of the flaming light, and the moss arrow not only cushioning otherwise noisy floors, but also acting as a means of muffling the cries of would be noisy guards.

One of the best pieces of design in the game is the incentive based gameplay, which positively rewards you in both money and satisfaction. On the default Normal difficulty you'll be tasked with picking up a minimum of 40 per cent of the booty stashed in each level before you can progress - to begin with this can seem like a fairly unwelcome piece of kleptomaniacal design that's forcing you to sniff around levels for the sake of it, but you soon realise that the more treasure you unearth, the more money you can trade it all in for, and therefore the more ammo you can buy in return. It all works out in the end, and the mere fact that you're encouraged to do this means you tend to learn the levels better as a result, meaning a more cunning approach and a better appreciation of how the game is structured.

Learning how to cope with the enemy AI is also a crucial art to learn. Every drone you come across is either having some pre-scripted natter with a pal, or maybe just muttering to themselves - either way, there's a palpable sense that they know what's going on. Perhaps it's fair to say that on Normal level they simple don't chase you far enough, but at least you're not forced to go through the dreaded Game Over sequence for the 200th time as you do with Thief's stealth rivals. Instead, you can always rely on the fact that you can hide out in the dark and wait for them to get bored of looking - as a coherent and less frustrating gameplay experience it's infinitely preferable, if a little amusing when the person looking for you gives up when they're practically on top of you.

Mapped out

In comparison to its peers, the levels are quite sizeable, and often you'll find yourself seriously lost as you try and beat a familiar path without attracting the attentions of your adversaries. One of the major negatives about Thief is its almost useless in-game map, that as well being a pain to access (via two sub menus) also doesn't pinpoint your position, or take into account different floors. It's possibly one of the least helpful in-game maps ever made, and until you've had time to build up your own mental map of each level that you'll be getting lost on a regular basis and singularly unable to make serious progression. It's a time consuming game as it is. You have to pick your way through it carefully, so the last thing you need is something so basic being so inescapably flawed. It's not the end of the world, though, and you quickly accept the fact and just get on with it. In a way it forces you to play the mission in rather the same way as you would in reality- by recognition and common sense rather than a mini map with Sat Nav. This is, after all, a low tech era.

What most definitely cannot be accused of being low tech is the game engine. If anything, such lavish visuals, complemented by a fantastically well implemented persistent state system (i.e. all dead bodies stay right where you left them) are setting the benchmark for what the Xbox can do, both in terms of lighting, texturing, level size, character model detail and animation, and - of course - their rag doll physics. However, such enormous feats of ambition come at a heavy price, with a frame rate well less than the 25fps that Ion Storm would have been gunning for. At times the game feels so sluggish that you'd swear it's struggling to render double figures, but miraculously Ion Storm gets away with it.

It's hard to reconcile how a game that looks so shaky at times can still remain so compelling, but the longer you play it, the less of an issue the low frame rate becomes - however hard that may be to believe. It's a slow paced game anyway, so it's not something that really affect the gameplay from one encounter to the next - chances are you'll be creeping up on your opponent so gently that you'll barely even register the frame rate. There's every chance, however, that PC owners brought up on slick frame rates and high end graphics card will have a fit when they see it in action on an Xbox, but there's one simple solution to that dilemma - buy the PC version.