Thief Review and Achievements Completion

Thief joins my list of 100% completed games. I can assure you that the stealth in Thief feels MUCH more satisfying than Dishonored. On Master (highest) difficulty during that nightmarish Chapter 7, I spent at least 45 minutes on the first room alone and then about 30 minutes on the 2nd room until I gave up and started using arrows to distract guards, which was something I didn't want to do because I was aiming for "no arrow" as a principle :P 

The game has custom difficulty options which is one of my most favourite features about it. On top of general difficulty for the overall game, you can add even extra challenges such as "slower movement", "no alarms", "no knockouts or kills". If somewhere along the line, you fail the challenge you set for yourself, the mission immediately fails. This very challenging and rewarding stealth definitely makes up for the negatives I'm about to mention in the upcoming paragraph.

There were problems with clunky controls such as taking cover behind a table instead of looting its drawers as both actions have the same key. AI can be either too punishing or forgiving in the same difficulty. For example if someone sees you moving quickly from a light surface to shadow, they can either go "Oh I think I saw something, ah it was probably the wind" or "Faithless, kill him!!" There were a lot of inconsistencies in their behaviour. 

Certain guard movements also change if you load a save. If you save when a guard is leaving his post and reload that save, you might find that guard coming to that post instead of leaving, which is how it's supposed to be according to your save. I failed a couple of times due to this as when I reloaded a save I somehow ended up between 2 guards who immediately saw me which was not supposed to happen. 

The city is insanely hard to navigate. The city is free roam but there aren't multiple paths to a location you're trying to go to, and that's coming from someone who has discovered every single secret room, passage etc. There were times I spent more time trying to get to the location in the map where I needed to start the next chapter than the time I spent playing that chapter...

If you want great and challenging stealth gameplay (depending on how you stealth), I'd definitely recommend Thief as it is a very rewarding experience except the subpar story. If you wanna shoot people with arrows, you can do that too I guess. I didn't do any combat so I can't say anything about it. I can tell you that there are lots of arrow options though and it's certainly possible to light enemies on fire if you use fire arrows on flammable objects such as barrels or oil puddles on the floor. I'm sure some of you would love that...