A cocky thief in training is sent by her mentor, a Master Thief on a simple heist, but when things get heated, he sends he away to Italy, to learn from one of the best and maybe, maybe, become the Thief of Thieves.
The Good
- Unique Look: I really like comic books style cutscenes, they bring the best of that medium into the gaming world. They’re easier to make, the details are crisp and awesome and you get the chance to discover an artist you didn’t know about before. But Thief of Thieves goes a step further and wraps the in-game look & feel in the same art-style, not only having consistency between cutscene and game but also making it so the transitions between the pages and the game feel incredibly natural.
- Detect…Thief Vision: I really like the intuition aspect of it, where a press of a button identifies things in the environment, almost like highlights on a page, this great overlay of white lines and scribbles describe people and objects. Kinda feels like what a thief would have, just this clear paper with names and such they could lay on top of some blueprints to mark important things.
- Weird…but cool: Love the theme song, just a cool beat and the characters reciting the elements of a good heist. It’s simple, it’s weird, but catchy as all hell!
The Bad
- Flat and Bland: God I dislike these characters. There’s no depth to them and despite the good voice acting they’re completely one-note, characters built around a single personality trait, no nuance. Celia is Cocky, Chip is Nerdy, Redmond is secretive. That’s it, that’s all you need to know.
- In Perspective: You know, forced camera angles work really well for certain game but they’re horrible for stealth. So many times, I wanted to know what was going on beyond my current position but the game kept the same zoom levels hiding details the character would and should be capable of seeing. At point you can switch to a different angle, but the usefulness of that is limited as hell. Zoom was the key element here, zoom. And it’s not.
- The Bad kind of Stealth: Inability to defend yourself, guards that take you out in one go, cover and darkness that only sometimes works, incredibly annoying security-bypassing minigames, Thief of Thieves just wants to make stealth, the core of its gameplay, as boring and as uninteresting as possible for you. Midway through the first couple of missions I was unimpressed going towards nodding off to sleep, and it didn’t get better.
- Cheap Security: I could’ve rolled this one into the previous point but I wanted to focus on this a little bit more. Whoever decided that things keep moving, characters and guards can still find you and even kill you while you’re stuck in a cutscene, deserves a very special place in hell. So many times, I got through security, got to a cutscene and saw people that had nothing to do with the cutscene walk into the shot and suddenly spot me, because of course they would in that situation. It’s nightmarish, and so common and so incredibly infuriating.
