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Well, the title pretty much sums it up. Occupation followed by desired acquisition.
Thief, conceptually is a simple game. Load level, steal stuff, get out. For the time period that this game came out, it made a lot of thief tools available to you that not every stealth game (not that there were an abundant of them) was necessarily providing at the time. You can avoid bloody messes by knocking people out. You can drag bodies to hide them. You can walk on soft surfaces to hide your footsteps. You can hide in the shadows. If being a thief is your role-playing thing, then this game is completely tailored to providing you that experience.
Ah, the sewers. A thief’s best friend.
I’d always heard great things of this game. For its time, it certainly would have been above par. I wasn’t that impressed by it though, probably for a slew of reasons. First, it hasn’t aged particularly well–it’s graphics are old, humanoids live in uncanny valley, the controls aren’t sharp, item management is a bit cumbersome and AI is reasonable but a bit stodgy. Second, I’m not sure I innately have the patience required to succeed in the profession of permanent borrowing. If you want to be a good thief, you must move slowly, be aware of your surroundings and stay out of sight. If you want to be a great thief, you must memorize the level layout, the guard’s positioning and the location of all the treasure. I on the other hand must have wanted to be a clumsy drunken thief because I ran around in plain site, blackjacking everything that moved and dumping the bodies into the nearest well for fun. I guess I’d need to be in a much more patient mood to get the most out of this one.
Still though, Thief manages a fair system. You can make small mistakes here and there and be forgiven. Walk into the front gate surrounded by guards? They don’t immediately open fire but instead try to drive you off the grounds. Become discovered by a single guard walking alone? Not a big deal–you’ve got plenty of health to do that a few times. However, the game punishes large mistakes (as it should). Try to take on more than one guard at a time, or make too much noise in a crowded area and you’ll be in trouble.
Thief isn’t a bad game, it’s just old. If you don’t like walking around and clicking on gold and chests while hiding from guards, it doesn’t have much to offer you. It’s still a Tier 2 game–on the off-chance that I feel like being a sneaky rogue, this certainly would fill that need more than our popular modern day’s stealth simulator, Assasin’s Creed, where “stealth” means holding down the “act like a priest key” and rounding a corner. For the time being though, I prefer my first-person games to give me the ability to be a bit more bombastic–and a lot more mischievous. Like kicking people off of cliffs. Oh Might and Magic Dark Messiah…
