Thief is a restart for the Thief series. Albeit the present game is far superior to Thief 3, Thief fails to become a uber game on its own merit.
Garret continues Garret, a multi skilled thief with little regard for other's properties. The City is an enormous map composed of sector maps that are available as you progress through the game. As usual we are dealing with a steam punk world, where tech and medieval are heavily present.
I played thief via Steam and it took me 94 hours to beat it. I have heard seveal complaints over thief being to short, too easy and so on. There are serious troubles with Thief, but these mentioned here are not. First you must realize you are playing a STEALTH game, not a shooter or a racing game. Thief is all about PACE. You must lower your pace to truly enjoy all it has to offer. Thief strenghts rely on patience and discovery. You must watch as guards move to learn their paths, move very silently to pass them and so on. In this game you are not a killing machine with invulnerability, far from that.
To add a thrill, several nice achievements become a real challenge, adding value to this game, like completing sets of collectables, or doing all side quests or even gettting as much loot as possible ( IF you can find them)
What prevented Thief to becoming a major title is its story. Unfortunately its story. While we cannot complain at all regarding graphics, renderization etc... we cannot say the same for its story.
The main story is good, has a weak start, but it evolves well, so much that you wont be disappointed at final levels. The same cannot be said to side jobs (missions). Some are poor explained or poor in lenght. Some are laughtable.
While the main story is good, and evolves well like i said, it fails to deliver a lot of needed answers. Because you deserves to know at the end why you put so much effort in this anyway. For example, you dont know almost nothing about the girl you have to save (but at the beggining of Thief it look like both of you are best friends ever. ) Why and where Garret was in his one year absence ? What the Primal is ? Failing to deliver these answers you have the sensation that you put so much time and effort for nothing. Not to mention the LAME ending. I almost fall back from my chair. Is this the end ? The fight prior to the last one had a decent ending.
A lot of gamers playing in other plataforms, likely xbox and ps3 complained with looong loading screens. I did not suffer this as i have a good pc gaming machine, but i have to mention that the developers put a LOT of loading screens in game. No clue why but this is a serious let down.
Putting these downs aside, all i can say is that Thief is a decent game, but whlie i was playing it i cannot stop comparing it with Dishonored. And when i was in rooftops avoiding guards i missed blink ability greatly. All in all Dishonored is a better game than Thief. The student surpassed its master.