It's broken.
User Rating: 6 | Thief: Deadly Shadows XBOX
Now what the fork is up with this game. The first two are the best games I have ever played, when everyone was raving about a pretty decent shooter called half-life I was immersing myselve it the greatest gameworld ever created, huge realistic levels, seemingly filled with life, you could almost touch the walls and smell the weird medieval town. Ambient sounds dripping with atmosphere, the first step towards having real physics (oh the first time I fired that bow, I was amazed) and last but not least, an AI that was no less then revolutionary, they actually searched for you, absolutily unheard of. Well that leaves us with Deadly Shadows, a game based on the games I just described, calling it a sequel I won 't do; Deadly Shadows is merely a game based on Thief. It isn't even a bad game per se, actually it is pretty decent compared to wannabe's like the Splinter Cell's. But decent won't do for my most beloved Thief. So many things wrong with this title. Let's start with what they did right, they hired the same voiceactor, and the ambient music is once again excellent. Oh, and the Cradle should be considered the magnus opus of videogame creation, it's nothing short of brilliant. But there is soooooooo much soooooo wrong. The levels are small, the loading times are long, just the 'Ambushed' mission of Thief 2 is bigger then the entire city of DS, much bigger. The AI is broken, sure they will say 'why not look there in the shadows', but it 's all windowdressing that serves nothing but the immersion, the immersion that you don't there because of so many small annoyances and baffling design decisions (climbing gloves? what was wrong with the rope arrow? And why can't I swim? Who put glue on my feet?). The physcis don't feel solid. Unlike the previous game you don't feel like you are pulling the string of a bow, and are actually firing a solid object. When you blackjack someone it looks as if you dropped a battlecruiser on their heads, and that before your hit connects. Nothing seems to have any real weight, this is how people with mechanical arms must feel. It's not just the gameplay, sooo much sloppyness. What happened to the moody handdrawn briefings you got before the missions, I really missed those. This game has dissapointed me on so many levels. If you never played the previous titles, go ahead, you will probably like Deadly Shadows for what it is. But I can't like because of what it isn't, a true sequel to my favorite game ever made.
