Thief 3 manages to keep a remarkably fast pace and never seems repetitive despite its stealth focus.
Many years later, after being weaned on the joy of tiptoeing around in the dark as Sam Fisher and snapping terrorists' necks, I found Thief 3 in the bargain bin and wondered why I hadn't given it a go.
Thief is a solid stealth-action game with a genuinely open level design that encourages some simple lateral thinking. You are encouraged to be as simple or as elaborate as you like. If you can grasp the basics of stealth gameplay, each level is relatively fast paced, and gives you new locales and puzzles. In between missions, you play out minor objectives within the city, opening up new districts and stores as you progress through the story.
I won't go over the game mechanics, because I'm sure anyone reading this is familiar with them - what I really want to highlight is the pleasant lack of tedium, the original level design, and a strongly paced, original story.
To be honest though, as much I loved Thief 3, being weaned on Splinter Cell highlighted the areas where the game's production values were sorely lacking. The AI is horrible - every character can only react in a single way to a stimulus, which produces some really retarded reactions. For example, if were to stealthily shoot one of a pair of guards, you might witness the survivor calmly walk past his dead compatriot but on the return journey a minute later, he would scream and run off waving his sword as if he had been beset by enemies.
The lack of graduated reactions by NPC's really does produce the game's only tedium - Garrett can blackjack a completely unsuspecting guard, but not a slightly suspecting one; one arrow will down a guard with his sword sheathed, but it takes three or four if he draws it. The AI eventually tempts one into relying completely on gadgets like gas arrows and flash bombs to completely avoid any semblance of stealth once it takes more than a single attempt to get past a guard, because you're unwilling to wait another minute for the guard to resume his patrol.
The story could also have done with some neater stitching together, because while it was coherent in theory, the actual presentation jumped back and forth.
Really though....they're just pet peeves. They only annoy me because, well, I would love to rated Thief a masterpiece. It feels like it would only have taken a few nudges to the AI and voiceover dialogue to get it there.