by These games combine much of what makes playing games fun. In both (and the second one, The Metal Age – but I didn’t play that one), you play as a thief (shocking, I know). You’re given a simple heist mission and the ability to accomplish it however you like. From there, story grows in bits and pieces between the missions. But then, the story isn’t really why you’re here. The reason you’re here is to steal everything. And steal everything of value you can.
One of my favorite features of these games is the adaptable objective system – more so in the first (but still present in the third), the difficulty level you choose doesn’t really change how the game plays – it changes what you need to accomplish. Lower difficulties just have you surviving and accomplishing the goal. Higher difficulties have you not killing civilians and stealing everything that isn’t tied down. And I think that’s fantastic. That’s how difficulty should feel. Giving the player more health or the enemies less damage doesn’t mean anything but changing some numbers. Giving you new challenges forces you to grow as a player, rather than just execute the same thing more and more perfectly.
I would be remiss if I didn’t also mention the fantastic level design and worldbuilding. Each level has multiple approaches. The guards walk their shifts while humming to themselves (which is amusing even if it does make for some of the noisiest guards I’ve ever seen). Everything feels like a guarded place you’re not supposed to be, but that you’re going to rob blind anyway. Even so, it never feels cheap – when guards see you, you deserve it. Even better, the game doesn’t automatically end if you’re spotted. You have a chance to recover and stop the guard before he raises the alarm and kills you. In other words, this is the kind of gameplay I would have hoped for from Assassin’s Creed.
The last thing I should mention is that these games still have a modding community. For The Dark Project, there are fixes and resolution upgrades. For Deadly Shadows, there’s a meta-mod of sorts that fixes everything from resolution to enemy difficulty to map backgrounds. Both of these are practically essential with modern hardware, but come with the bonus that they also improve both games dramatically from a technical standpoint. With these mods, both these games come in at a solid Tier One.