A sequel with great potential to the greatest stealth francise ever made got ruined by the xbox.
User Rating: 6.4 | Thief: Deadly Shadows PC
Seriously this game is a huge disappointment. It feels more like thief 0.5 with a newer, but highly bug-ridden and unstable engine. After the fiasco Warren Spector and Eidos inflicted upon deus ex: invisible war with its xbox compromise that completely killed off the entire francise, you think they would learn to avoid the same mistake in thief 3, but nope. Warran Spector bragged so hard on how he wanted the sequels to be significantly different, yet the end result is nothing more than a much dumbed down translation of the previous games with some initially seeming superficial additions or changes that turned out to break the game. Warran Spector broke deus ex: invisible war with his universal ammo implementation, and he done it again -- though to a lesser degree -- with the 3rd person camera in thief 3. It appears the entire game is designed around using the 3rd person camera, with the 1st person as an afterthought -- as if the developer was intentionally betraying the game's root. There's no point in using the first person perspective besides for added atmosphere, and even then the head bogging and moving is very disorienting unlike the first two games. There's no way to fix this other than going into the game's .ini file -- reminiscent to deus ex: invisible war and all its un-removed xbox settings (in the pc version). This is very lazy on the developer's part. The game has most of deus ex: invisible war's problems as well: very small levels further divided into sublevels with long loading times in between, dumb AI, etc. The city serving as the game's hub is a near idea but poorly implemented and only serves to slow the game down. Since the game appears to be designed around using the 3rd person camera, the game looks like a poor man's Splinter Cell. Again, most of these problems clearly results from compromises made so it can play better on the xbox (though it runs like a slideshow on it). The developer ignored what made the originals so good and successful. Instead of making the game that fans of the original will like, they ignored them and made infuriating changes that are more acceptable to the casual console market. However, the final game turned out to be too consolish for the PC crowd, and too PCish for the console crowd. The irony is that in the developer’s greedy attempt to appeal to a larger crowd, they ended up alienating its PC fan roots and got ignored by the console players, resulting in far less sales then it should’ve had and a premature death for the franchise. So congratulation Warren Spector and Eidos, you guys sure know how to kill off two great franchises (other being deus ex) with one stone.
