hief: Deadly Shadows is third in a series of award-winning PC games spawned in the '90s, though the whiz development house behind the first two (Looking Glass) is now defunct. Ion Storm, headed by veteran development legend Warren Spector (Ultima Underworld, System Shock, Deus Ex), picked up the license a few years ago and slotted it for development using the same advanced 3-D engine powering Ion Storm's late 2003 critically acclaimed release, Deus Ex: Invisible War.
Thief is a stealth-action game, where avoiding combat and detection, picking locks and stealing from the smugly prosperous takes precedence over mindless carnage. Players assume the role of the same master thief from the previous two titles, Garrett, a former member of an elite secret power sect known as the Keepers, the true power behind the city. Prowling a sprawling medieval steampunk metropolis, Garrett is drawn into a sinister prophecy heralding the arrival of great evil and an imminent Dark Age.
The story is chopped into individual missions with goals that change according to the difficulty level selected (higher difficulty makes the AI smarter and more wary, and increases the number of things Garrett must do to achieve mission success). Garrett is controlled with the left thumb-stick in either first- or third-person mode, and the camera or view can be rotated using the right thumb-stick. At his fingertips (and the player's, via the left and right triggers) Garrett has an arsenal of stealth weapons, including water arrows (extinguish torches to darken an area), moss arrows (coat hardened surfaces to dampen noise), noisemaker arrows (to distract guards), fire arrows (to light an area), gas arrows (poison the air or choke a guard), a blackjack for knocking guards unconscious, a dagger for hand-to-hand combat when necessary and several other magical and mechanical items designed to combat both the living and the undead. As loot is acquired and the game advances, Garrett is given increasingly free access to different sections of the city where loot can be exchanged for money, in turn used to replenish his inventory.
A slipstream fantasy world
Deadly Shadows is classic stealth gaming at its best, a lovely-to-look-at game where rats scurry about, torches cast flickering shadows, guards and citizens banter intelligently with each other in spontaneous situations and the ambiance of a slipstream medieval fantasy world creeps out of sewer grates and befogged back alleys.
Benefiting tremendously from Ion Storm's next-generation 3-D technology, the physics engine is the best seen yet: Barrels roll down ramps into curved troughs and rock back and forth with eerie realism; lamps knocked off tables will hit chairs or other objects and ricochet appropriately, all the while casting light-sourced rays that shudder and contort just as they would in reality. The architectural design of the buildings is equally praiseworthy, and one wonders if architectural engineers are being recruited to buttress (no pun intended) the structural verisimilitude of castles and prisons that adhere both internally and externally to the strictures of their apparent space limitations. Some may complain that the frame rate drops in a few areas, but it's no worse than anything you'd find in a game like Zelda 64, and the graphical tradeoff is unquestionably worth a few dropped frames.
Aside from graphics, the biggest difference between this and the previous two games is the amount of freedom Garrett has to roam the city and, to a certain extent, accrue missions on the fly. If you're caught by guards during one of the earlier missions, for instance, you're thrown into prison and must escape in order to continue. Spector was part of gaming legend Richard Garriott's coterie for perhaps the most critical catharses to emerge from the Ultima series, one of which was to dramatically extend Garriott's mantra: Give the player a goal, but provide dozens of alternate ways to accomplish it. That philosophy is prominently on display here, so that missions can be played over and over again with enough variability to ensure a different experience or route to success each time.
It may be a surprise to some that games like Splinter Cell and Syphon Filter owe nearly everything (save for their contemporary setting) to the Thief series—the pioneer of stealth-action games, and still the standard to beat. If Deadly Shadows has one critical flaw, it's that it does little to revolutionize the stealth genre, and merely extends the proven creep-and-snipe formula of its imitators into the realm of cutting-edge graphics.
The PC and Xbox versions are identical, but there's something about finally getting to run Garrett in front of a 32-inch screen with a game controller that's unbeatable.
— Matt
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