A more than worthy successor to the best stealth game ever.
User Rating: 9.7 | Thief II: The Metal Age (Trapezoide Box) PC
For those who haven't played the first game, the Thief series puts you in the sneaky shoes of Garrett, a master thief in a fictional medieval town. Amidst his burglarizing of wealthy manors, he tends to get involved in more sinster happenings, enlisted by the order of the mysterious Keepers to maintain the balance against evil. In this game, the evil takes the form of the Mechanists, an offshoot of a masonic-type order called the Hammerites. Mechanists hate the organic and strive to bring machinery to all aspects of life. Their leader has some especially dark plans concerning the fate of life in the city. As a thief, you aren't heavily armored or especially equipped for combat. You do have a sword, but you will generally lose in a swordfight against more than one person, and even in one on one combat you stand to sustain losses. Instead of fighting, the idea is to sneak around in the shadows and avoud being seen. To this end, you have a trusty bow with various arrows for different functions. Water arrows extinguish torches and furnaces, fire arrows can kill human and machine, moss arrows cover surfaces otherwise too loud to walk on undetected (marble, metal), noisemaker arrows distract guards, and rope arrows dangle a convenient climbing rope. Your other primary tool will be your blackjack, a club useful for sapping unaware guards. In case you do run into some angry guards, you also have some escape options. Flash bombs temporarily blind everyone nearby, speed potion allows you to dash away, and invisibility potions enable you to vanish completely. Each level has several objectives, some advancing the storyline, some just for looting purposes. It is best to complete them all, especially those asking you to fetch a particular treasure, as the money you earn will be used to buy gear for the next mission. The environments are completely immersive, and an impressive amount of dialogue was recorded for ambling NPCs. The best way to experience the game is on the expert difficulty setting, as it forces you to rely totally on stealth. It's just very exciting trying frantically to pick a lock so you can toss a body in the closet as you hear the footsteps of a patrolling guard slowly approaching. Enemy AI is decent but not great, and you can usually count on a guard to return to duty fairly quickly after he hears an odd noise. It is also very easy to sneak up and knock them out with the blackjack, even on expert. Nevertheless, the game retains a wonderful sense of danger and presents a tough challenge. The storyline is one of the best I've seen in a game, and really sucks you into the Thief world. You don't even need a fast PC to run this game anymore, and I'm sure it is very cheap by now, and has a classic quality that will make it fun to play no matter how much more advanced computer games get.
