I feel bad for Eidos Montreal. After all, Nic Cantin and his team have been hard at work on the stealth reboot since 2008, and in the last year all we’ve heard about is the game has come from die-hard fans complaining about XP.
After spending four hours with the title, I’m confident in saying that those fans really have nothing to worry about.
If you’re unfamiliar with Thief, this rebooted title is soon to become the fourth instalment of the popular series. Franchise hero Garrett finds himself in a revamped city with revamped powers, but as Cantin stressed in our recent interview, the game has been designed with the DNA of Thief in mind at all times.
We got to go hands-on with Thief right from the start of the game. After the tutorialesque Prologue, you’re let loose into the new city. Chapters themselves can be fairly linear, but exploration is encouraged; after all, how are you going to find all the loot otherwise? Side-quests are also plentiful, with a number available at any given time. Exploration also will provide the opportunity to unlock even more side-quests. It – like the custom difficulty settings – seem to be there for you to uncover on your own. It’s a nice little feeling to be rewarded for your curiousity.
Garrett, sporting new digs (and a hoodie!) is a Master Thief. He skulks around in the darkness, waiting to strike. Armed with his usual arsenal, he can use arrows to put out or relight fires, a claw tool to traverse buildings and his trusty blackjack to knock out guards. His new Focus powers basically work like Batman: Arkham’s Detective Mode, highlighting useful items in the environment. Unlike Bats and his cowl, you can’t use Focus all the time; it’s a limited resource that takes time to regenerate after it’s been depleted.
You can approach situations stealthily or aggressively, though it’s much easier to go about it sticking to the shadows. It’s not Fallout 3-style stealth either; if you’re too loud picking a lock, guards will actively seek you out. And, as I found out the hard way, they’ll even wake up from a nap if you’re in the same room.
If you’re a hardcore fan already turning your nose up at the idea of Focus, you can relax; the game has been balanced so you never have to use Focus. Even better, Thief’s custom difficulty functionality means you can actually disable Focus entirely. In that custom settings area, you can also disable instasaves, instead having them trigger at the end of each of the game’s chapters.
There’s a massive list of features you can tweak to make the game difficult, and for each toggled feature, you get credit for your courage. If you manage to complete the game with your custom settings, that credit turns into points which are then compared on a leaderboard against other players. The goal there is to prove to the world that you’re the toughest, sneakiest Thief around.
It’s great to see that Square Enix is now two for two when it comes to reboots of late; Thief will stand proudly beside Tomb Raider as a game you definitely need to try for yourself. You’ll get your chance.
You’ll get the chance to experience Thief for yourself when it arrives on PC, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360 and Xbox One from 27 February 2014.
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