Very excited to get and play
Thief III the third (
and last?!?) in a fantastic series of games. The "first person sneaker" genre is a fantastic, revolutionary concept.
This is a review of Thief III, paraphrased from Tycho's review on
Penny Arcade!:
"Thief is the best game I've played this year. I do believe, having seen everything in there, that the clock was running out by the end and they had to make the best of a bad situation - that, or the publisher was not terribly diligent when examining release candidates. In addition, the cinemas have an odd, uneven quality that I found a bit jarring, but it hardly made me uninstall the game. It's just that when you have a game like this, with so much good showing, the half-way stuff really pops. Properly tuned, I think that Thief belongs with MGS or Splinter Cell as a perfectly valid expression of sneaking gameplay - but it's going to take more than my say so to make a publisher believe that.
I have to be honest, though - I play Thief games for the stories. Me sneaking around the castle undetected and the guards being hamstrung by their AI routines, I mean, that's pretty much the same thing to me. It's easy to call this one of the best worlds that is wholly native to videogames, with its steampunk trappings, its warring factions, its odd dialects, and its eminently likable protagonist. I think there was a fear that Thief III would, with its simultaneous console development, suffer for it - occupying some twilight world somewhere between two finished games.
You could call the addition of a third person mode a console concession as well, but I think it's a great addition - particularly if Garrett is going to look this cool. I mentioned once that the ambient light of a given scene would highlight the edges of the character to keep him visible, and I never got tired of this effect even after marathon 12 hour sessions. I found myself switching back and forth actually, using both views in concert. Something else you should know about Thief III: it has Eric Brosius on audio, which is the same person that did not only the previous games but also System Shock 2, whose audio alone was able to give me a nervous breakdown. I'm not making a joke, I'll tell you about it sometime if you want - it was horrible. At any rate, he's at the top of his game. I used third person to bleed off the tension in a level about three quarters of the way through the game, I don't want to give anything away, so I won't name it. But let me tell you that I was desperate with terror on more than one occasion, and I could not bear to be in first person mode. Name the last game where that happened. "
