Oy, Yahtzee! Due your incessant pestering I illegally torrented a pirated version of... I mean I properly purchased at a duly authorized, sales tax collecting retail outlet - this 'Thief II' game you keep slipping into my cocktail like so much Rohypnol. After all, you did turn me on to Valve's 'Portal,' though I came aboard a year passed the ship's launching. Late though I've come to the party, the light shone was true and the cake - as it were - was not a lie.
"So let's have at this Thief II the man's on about," I say to myself, "I've little care for tri-linear, anisomorphic rendering methods. I can suffer some poorly animated, low-poly count NPC's if the gameplay holds its water as well as he says."
Oh the tragedy! Before you fire off any more references to how great Thief II is might I suggest removing the rose coloured goggles and torrenting yourself a copy... Err... Contacting the manufacturer and requesting a fully licensed, new in box, original packaged disc at true retail value. For it is not the glimmering gem you recall it to be.
Now, call me cock-slapping nutballs crazy, but when I begin a game entitled "Thief" - and I don't care how many nondescript slashy marks you use to indicate its sequalage - I expect to launch into this new career by... Oh, I don't know; How 'bout we try some thieving? Yes, I'm a thief, okay. Let's steal some shit! Instead my introductory mission has little to do with the plunder of booty or even the pirating of software. Here I stand heaving about an unwieldy cache of swords, arrows, lock-picks, and flash bombs - not to mention an empty burlap sack neatly labeled "Loot," and what's to be my first foret into this new and exciting field of high-stakes professional burglary? Helping some love sick, turncoat, parole free the object of his heart's desire from a swath of assuredly despicable, though yet unseen, captors. All the while picking up nothing more than pocket change in the process?! Pshaw, I say!
The first level plays as smoothly as a burn victims complexion. Aside from dropping into the gameplay with a default keyboard layout that required me to rebind the controls before I'd even learned the abilities I was being forced to rearrange, I find myself polygonal face to polygonal face with an awkward "go and come and go again" assignment.
"Here," they tell me, "go clear the way for this 'scared straight' douchehole who, by the way, was in the same business as you right up until yesterday and even picks locks better than you do, but still for some reason direly requires your 'unique' skills and can't do this by his-damned-self. Oh, and when you've cleared the path for ol' Mr. Redundant over here, blow on this whistle to let him know the coast is clear for pussies like him to move about."
After no small amount of trial and error did I begin to comprehend what I was supposed to do and how I was supposed to do it. This despite the seemingly plain and clear list of objectives presented by the mission's briefing. The rest of the game left unconsidered, the first level is so damned unintuitive that they might as well have placed a giant talking arrow at the end of each hallway, voiced by James Earl Jones and engulfed in Moses' flame guiding me directly to each stop on my tour, and it still would not have made the goals any clearer to realize in practice.
Nonetheless I persevered, knocking out all the guards in my path, quenching the thirst of every shadow-casting flame that would otherwise expose my character's blocky sinews. At last returning to the beginning of the map; back to the first room I broke into that I might summon my cowardly apprentice, surely off wetting himself in a corner somewhere. I blew my whistle, signaling Dr. Do-Little to make his approach, but he did not approach, apparently not hearing my call. So I stepped outside the mansion and into the field from whence I first invaded this home and blew my bird-call once more. Yet he still refused me. So I walked up to the door of the small building wherein I had left him at the mission's onset and blew the accursed whistle again... Nothing! Finally I break open the door, walk up to the dunce, smack him in the nuts, and blow the whistle so close to his dumb fucking face that I can see the spittle gathering on the bridge of his nose. At which point he finally becomes convinced it's not just the sound of his tinnitus acting up again, and starts to move a little ass.
Now with Deaf-o on the run I get the exciting privilege of traversing the same halls of the same level that I just spent thirty minutes clearing - that I just back-tracked all the way out of - only to reach little miss save-me's door for the second time, turn around and run all the way back out again! Yay! Nothing like running the same level four times to make a so-called "sprawling map" seem that much smaller and more repetitive. By the time I realized the second level intended to set me at the similarly arduous task of running back to the same control room after opening each of twenty different garage doors one at a time I shut the game down, opened my control panel, and uninstalled it.
Did I overreact? I don't think so.
I've played 'Hitman' and I've played 'Splinter Cell' and whatever you may think of them I much prefer their brand of 'sneak.' Maybe being introduced to the genre by its significantly more polished bastard-children, those who bore the benefit of Thief's trials and unabashed, screaming, bleeding, flying, fucking failures, ruined me for this game before I ever drew upon it. Or maybe, and more likely, it's just a clunky, blind cornered, delayed attack, checkpoint-less, press f10-to-save, two hundred hour play time 'cause we make you run in goddamned circles, piece of diarrhea-green shit; With the only reason you think otherwise being a distorted view through the blurred veil of time, wrapped in the folly of youth whereby you recall it.
If you haven't lately, you might want to take a second glance at this 'Thief II' before you tout any more of its laurels. By my estimation it has not aged well.
roy
P.S.: Lord, do I hate the internet scum who claim the authority to re-review reviews as I've just done as though anyone cares to hear their ill-informed, arm-chair quarterback opinions. I am become what I hate. Oh, what's a boy to do? ...But shoot off at the mouth for kicks.
