Top 50 Challenge 2014 - Thief

Andy Reiner challenged me to test my stealth skills in Eidos Montreal's reboot of the Thief franchise? Did this game steal my heart? You'll have to read on to find out (Get it? I said "steal" my heart because the game about a guy who steals things...pretty clever).

I like to go into games with a positive attitude, but I didn't need much coaxing in this case. Thief was one of those classic cases of an earlier-in-the-year game I was interested in that somehow got neglected. In general, I think these Top 50 Challenges are valuable for making sure that our list doesn't skew too far towards the last four months of the year.

Learn more about Game Informer's Fight for the Top 50 Challenge 2014

While I started playing the game with a lot of enthusiasm, I didn't have any nostalgia for the series. I've never actually played the original Thief: The Dark Project, which was developed by Doug Church and Ken Levine and is generally considered one of the founding games of the stealth genre. If anything, I was less excited by the game's lineage than its surface similarities to Dishonored, a game I consider a minor classic.

I'm happy to report that - while it's not nearly as creative as Dishonored - Thief is an extremely engaging stealth/action game. The opening cinematics set a dramatic scene - a slightly Victorian world with some magic plagued by disease and controlled by cabals of shadowy elites. I won't spoil it, but you get a great sense of who lead character Garrett is and his motivations. Along the way, more layers of the world - and intriguing new characters - are revealed. I do have some concerns about the game's ability to tie everything together in the end, but I intend to keep playing and find out.

These dramatic events are interspersed with nicely designed tutorials that introduce you to the game's sneaking and thieving mechanics. It's a nice set of tools and the game does a great job of forcing you to use them. Keeping to the shadows, using distractions like thrown bottles, and an arsenal of different arrows and gadgets are your keys to survival. While Garrett isn't a pushover, if you're engaged in combat, things likely won't end well. In a stealth game, that's as it should be. In Thief, you're constantly learning how to pick the best path through each area. Thanks to frequent checkpointing, this trial-and-error experimentation didn't verge into frustration (for the most part).

It's certainly not perfect; the "open world" hub areas are weirdly conceived, and I was often confused as to where to go. Also, the sometimes-primitive AI shows a game that's technology is rooted in the last generation of consoles. There were also some odd technical problems, most notably some really terrible animated "rain" textures which made rooftops and cobblestone streets look as if they were overlayed with an old screensaver.

My Vote

So far, though, none of these problems are distracting me from what I enjoy about Thief. Ultimately, I just like the basic gameplay mechanics and missions. That's really what I want in a game: the ability to play as a cool character doing interesting things in a compelling world. Thief is game that is very focused on what it does well. I can't wait to finish it, but it already has my vote to be one of our Top 50 games of the year.