Genuinely one of the most worthless games I've ever played. The entire identity of Thief was stripped away for this incredibly boring, generic version that desperately attempts to appeal to folks who had no interest in the type of game Thief inherently is to begin with.

Let's talk gameplay. After disabling about 500 needless UI prompts the original games never needed, you're greeted with core gameplay that is both shallow and broken.

The swoop completely trivializes most stealth, and 'Garrett' is relatively competent enough that he can roleplay a CoD game if you decide stealth isn't for you. Who cares!!!! The actual thieving in this game also becomes tedious from Garrett having additional animations every time you pick up an item, snuff out a light, forget to say night to grandma etc. The attempt at giving Garrett weight in this game only serves to make everything feel slow and tedious. The very act of grabbing some loot feels unrewarding IN A GAME ABOUT GRABBING LOOT.

Ostensibly this game borrows quite a lot from Thief Deadly Shadow's structure in that levels are accessed through a hub you can buy things in, only instead of a relatively seamless experience that takes maybe a minute per section to traverse add on about 3 minutes for completely illogical routes so you can be funneled into loading screen animations. The City in the original games is such a well realized place that conveys perfectly the ideas it is trying to represent through suggestion, while here the game's stark ripoff Dishonored London deprives the setting of any personality and just sucks to look at.

The story is a complete waste of time since not a single character in it particularly matters. The villain in specific is so poorly written that I have to imagine his traits were drawn from a hat for how well they mesh together. His actions are completely illogical and yet he is framed as if he is some equal to 'Garrett' or something? Not to mention his horrible mandatory boss fight that should have never been made.

What makes the story so frustrating is that Thief Deadly Shadows already had a fairly decent setup for a future sequel in its ending which this game INITIALLY seems to be following up on, only for Erin to proceed to be completely uninteresting and turn into a plot macguffin who you're supposed to care about finding. Like, why should I care??? She sucks lmaoo

This game went through a fairly extensive amount of development hell with like four different studios or something working on it and it definitely shows in the final product, a far cry from the original trilogy being made with a close knit community of developers and artists. This game is entirely committee approved and seeks to please some spectre of an Ideal Gamer in every facet of it's design in the hopes of making some money, and completely betrays what the original games stood for to begin with.

Genuinely, don't play this game ever. You and your time are far more valuable then wasting your life energy on this drivel. Play the original trilogy, they are incredible games that will change how you see art and deserved to be discussed far more then this.

14 year old me was in love with dishonored at the time, and this game taught me to not preorder full price games based solely on the fact that they look cool. before steams current refund system as well, so thats 60 bucks that's never coming back. this game is batshit boring and i couldn't even finish it back then, let alone now. i dont really have much else to say about this game, other than maybe the ambience is pretty nice? save your money unless you're a thief mega fan and wanna see what this nasty reboot is about.

While “Thief” was unique in its day, the controls and general user experience is absolutely from a different time. Why the developers decided to transfer those same controls to this 2014 game, I simply don’t know. It also feels quite clunky on top of that. The world feels like you’re playing an in development game, where it’s full of walls with only specific instances to interact with the game. The load times also just feel old. There’s loading screens between nearly every zone and none of the world feels connected. This is the kind of game I could see someone liking, but it turned me off quick and while I progress a little further into the game I realized I’d seen all there was to see and it wasn’t for me.

I have the sense that I'm supposed to dislike this game more than I actually do. The story is underwhelming, the lockpick minigame gets more annoying as the game progresses, AI is straight up confusing at times... there are lot of things you can point out that work against the experience. But I still found it to be oddly enjoyable. Part of it, I assume, is because I've not played any of the other Thief games. In a bubble it is not the type of experience I'd ever recommend anyone at any point to come back to or even consider going through for the first time, but it's not like I felt miserable playing this. So maybe that counts for something.

I absolutely love stealth games and I feel it's a genre that has not been well served for quite some time. We mostly get action games that have some stealth in it that generally don't give you anything more interesting than hiding in tall grass and whistling people over. For that reason, I'm kinder to modern releases that are pure stealth games; if a game from nine years ago can still be considered modern.

Thief is an OK game that I actually had a pretty good time with. Level design is the most important thing in stealth games and the actual levels are pretty decent. There's nothing as good as what you'd see in Dishonored or Hitman but I certainly enjoyed sneaking my way through them. The tradition of Thief games having at least one creepy level is upheld here and it does a pretty good job at being unsettling. Unfortunately, these levels are split up by a hub overworld. Hubs are hard to do in stealth games because returning to the same place to sneak past the same guards can get very tedious. The City in Thief is just bad and is filled with awkward loading zones. The game would be better without it but maybe they were worried the game would be too short with it gone. Maybe they wanted a hub to ground you in the world and have you meeting characters but the writing is completely awful. I did not care at all about any of the characters or the world. The cutscene at the end of the prologue that kickstarts the plot is incredibly stupid and nonscensical and it doesn't get much better from there.

Mechanically, I think the game is satisfying enough. I do like that you can actually move fairly fast through a level once you've worked out a good route. I'm not sure what the swoop move is actually doing but I did like doing it. The addition of focus which is this game detective vision which also serves as an upgradeable set of abilities does very much feel like a checklist for any modern game but I didn't dislike it. The games is definitely lacking the immersive sim aspects of the original games. Mantling is pretty limited, there's no different types of flooring that generate more or less volume (beyond a few patches of broken glass) and the rope arrows can only be used in select areas.

Im probably rating this game higher than it deserves but how many games like this are there left. I'll take what I can get and I do think it's good. Comparisons to a classic series will always be unflattering though.

I am biased, because the first two Thief games are my favorite games of all time, but this reboot is utterly dreadful. The gameplay is focused on being "cinematic" rather than giving the player freedom, resulting in boring level design that feels entirely on-rails. The lovable anti-hero from the predecessors is replaced by an edgelord with flat voice acting, and between the trite story and the spoon-feeding "did you know there's secret passages in this house we're guarding???" dialogue, the rest of the writing is not up to par either. The graphics, while good overall, have a drab art direction that loses the flair of the previous game in favor of a bland gray. If this game existed in a world without the previous Thief games and Dishonored, it might have been serviceable, but as it stands, this is an aggravatingly watered-down blemish on a once-great franchise.

This game has quite the reputation, though playing it a decade later it didn't seem as disastrous to me as people made out. It definitely feels like a product of its time (2014) but I encountered no bugs or stupid design choices.

Instead, the reason I ended up dropping it 4 hours in, was that I got fatigued by how unbelievably dreary and dull the world was. The visual palette and aesthetics were just relentlessly grim. Like, imagine Dishonored but without that game's stunning art direction, if it were just a dark shade of blue and black the entire time.

Also the character designs, particularly the protagonist himself, weirdly felt like they were a decade older than 2014, I'm not sure what happened there. Regardless the whole narrative and dialogue was very bland and I found myself zoning out with each scene.

I have to give credit to this game though, it lived up to its name. It stole 4 hours of my life. Kudos.

I found a good game in front of me. I think it's been very unfair. The biggest problem of the game is that the artificial intelligence behaviors in its open world are sometimes ridiculous. The other problem is that most of the side quests, except for a few, are largely satisfactory in terms of writing quality and story infrastructure, but are quite ordinary and easy in terms of gameplay. The game actually did an extraordinary job in terms of atmosphere. However, navigating its open world can bore some players after a while. Because they will feel monotonous. It was not a big problem for me because the level design in the game was great. The producer has designed every corner in the game, meter by meter, so that we can play it secretly, except for one or two places. This game definitely doesn't deserve to be knocked down. The adaptation of an old earth game like Thief (yes, I played the first game) to today's game design understanding is not as easy as you might think. The producer did his best. A slightly more impactful open world, more striking side quests could have been close to perfect. So if you're a fan of stealth and gothic, if you like Victorian England, I don't know of a game that gives that feeling better than this one.

Lot of people who played this game compare it to the original thief games, but as someone who hasn't yet played the original Thief games, this one was just pure joy.

I enjoyed it to the fullest and it's definitely one of my favorite games ever. Ofc I have a lot of favorite games, but this is one of them lol.

I can definitely recommend this game to people who want to get into it without thinking its just like the original games. Its a great thieving game, lots of fun for collecting, shooting the bow and escaping the guards.

There was also some spooky parts in the story which made me scared, but it was amazing.

A more damning way to view Thief 2014 other than just a shitty Thief game is that it's an accumulation of every single bad stealth game mechanic/trend that got popular from the 7th console generation. Levels needing to be split up by segmented loading areas because of the prioritization for graphical fidelity over gameplay, "Bamham Arkham" detective vision and UI elements like waypoints being mandatory to use because the levels would be incomprehensible otherwise, audio design is woefully underutilized so it's near impossible to hear enemies walking right towards you (apparently the late 90s stealth game doesn't have this issue), the use of repetitive animations that eats up the player's time, QTEs, bad action setpieces, shitty boss fights (or in this case, the only boss fight), it's all here in it's awful glory.

At it's best, it made me feel like I'm playing a mediocre level from Thief 3. At its worst, it reminds me that The Black Parade and The Dark Mod are FREE, yet this is a retail product for over a decade now.

People will remember Eidos Montreal for making okay-ish Deus Ex sequels and lament the fact they aren't making a new one. I'll always remember these people made one of the worst stealth games in existence and will probably be indifferent when they become another Embracer victim.