Recent reviews by dave

After 25 hours, I finally finished the tutorial

Great concept but the game is unfinished.

The game lacks stuff to do other than exploring caves and building bases.

The progression of the story is entirely dependant on caves or really just being able to find a tiny cave entrance hidden somewhere in the woods. Exploring caves is a core part of the game but it feels like the gameplay isn't designed with confined indoor spaces in mind.

I still enjoyed the game and would recommend buying it on sale but I just can't give it a positive review. It feels like an early access title that was abandoned

This game is melting my brain

You have got to be ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ me right now. I went into this with pretty low expectations but THE GUARDS STAY AGGRO WHEN I RELOAD A QUICKSAVE. I ♥♥♥♥ up and try to reload a quicksave but they just keep chasing after me. How the ♥♥♥♥ did this pass QA?

Skyrim bugs look like great features compared to this. Everything could be broken and this game would still be playable but how am I expected to play this game when SAVING DOESN'T SAVE YOUR PROGRESS???

Thief: The Dark Project is a good game. I would go as far as saying it's a pretty good game. But it certainly isn't amazing. It estabilished the great mechanics and features of the Thief series but it wasn't until the release of the sequel, Thief II: The Metal Age, when it was brought to perfection. It feels like the developers didn't yet fully commit to the idea in the first game but later went on to absolutely perfect it in the sequel.

There are 15 missions in the gold edition and most of the classic thieving action happens in the first five or so. You sneak around with your blackjack ready to strike whenever a guard turns up behind a corner, carefully choosing the most silent route and planning your next move. You feel the guards breathing on your neck when you're picking a lock in a tight corridor they are about to walk through, you put out torches and hide in the shadows. You get that sense of pride and accomplishment every time you hear that little *dink* that plays upon a loot pickup and you get almost aroused by the objective completed sound. You know that getting caught means you're either done or you are gonna have a bad time, since any hit from a guard will likely end you and archers can just quickscope you in mid air like it's nothing. (at least on the expert difficulty which I played on through both of the games and strongly recommend you do as well). Even if you don't die immediately and manage to escape and hide, the guards don't just forget about you in 30 seconds like they have the attention span of an average 9-year old fortnite gamer but keep searching for a long long time until they eventually exclaim "Must have been nothing" and go about their merry day and even after that they are still more alert and often turn around right when you approach them from behind. All this creates a level of immersion that just simply isn't surpassed by any modern games.

My main issue with some of the levels though, especially the ones without human enemies such as zombies, haunts, those ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ green fly-vomiting things and spiders, is that that ever-present feeling of vulnerability is either gone since you can just bunnyhop through the level and skip the sneaking alltogether (which is normally made impossible by human archers) or it becomes really frustrating because some non-human enemies just can't be knocked out and most of the time you'll be forced to fight them head on with a sword. (♥♥♥♥ spiders, all my homies hate spiders)

Due to how the story develops, the later missions become more and more linear, up to the point when the last one is basically a straight line. I still enjoyed these missions but the thrill and immersion that were present at the start of the game just weren't there anymore. These missions were designed with the intention of fitting into the story and narrative, and I think that really limited the potential they could have had.

Now the first Thief was in my eyes a sort of experiment by the developers to figure out what would people like and dislike about this kind of stealth game. They didn't know what features would sell well so they opted for variety, with many missions being drastically different than others in many aspects. That's not a bad thing but it made the game feel like it's been assembled of different parts to make it complete instead of being manufactured as a single piece. It lacks consistency.

But fear not because everything the original Thief did well, the Metal Age absolutely perfected. The first Thief was good; yes; but the second one is an absolute total ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ masterpiece. It did everything right and improved everything there was to improve. Instead of spiders that you couldn't sneak up on and was forced to break cover and take a few hits or ratmen that you could trap in a place where they couldn't reach you and kill with a sword, we got robots that could be turned off quietly with a water arrow or exploded with a fire arrow, alerting the nearby guards. (both options consuming precious resources and potentialĺy leaving you vulnerable later) This was much better than fighting a spider head on and alerting everyone nearby. All those linear sections tied to the story were cut down so the player would never feel that the game was pulling them by their hand down a predermined path. (an exaggeration but you get the point) They got rid of that forced variety and made The Metal Age into what I think is the true Thief experience and the greatest stealth game of all time.

I know this was supposed to be a review of Thief Gold and not the sequel but to all the people who are looking to get into the Thief series, my recommendation is that you start with Thief 2 and play the first game after that. I played them in that order as well and I found it better than if I would have played them in order. The stories don't overlap that much and I even found it more entertaining when I didn't know anything about what preceded the events in The Metal Age and the setting was covered in this mysterious fog.

At this point you've probably spent a solid 10 minutes reading this mess of a review so here's just a couple tips for new players getting into Thief (and Thief 2 as well):

1. Install the TFix patch. I can't give you a link but it's found on the TTGL forums. This makes the game more up to terms with current hardware, software and stuff generally. Or you can just buy the game on gog where it has the patch already preinstalled (seriously gog is great for older games... hence the name)
2. Play on the expert difficulty. It might seem scary playing on the highest difficulty right off the bat but the "getting used to it" comes really fast and you won't struggle as much as you might think you would in the first levels when you don't know much about the game yet. The main thing about expert is that you cannot kill any humans, which immerses you more than anything else into the role of the master thief (in other words, it really makes you feel like batman Garrett) and the feeling, when in the last mission of Thief 2 the objective not to kill anyone is removed, is like playing a whole new experience.
3. If you get stuck, The Keepers' Chapel is your saviour. After 20 hours in the game you'll probably even understand what the ♥♥♥♥ is going on in those walkthroughs.

That's about it.
Buy the game.
Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

And now if you'll excuse me I'm gonna go play the 2014 Thief and get dissapointed.

a must have in order to play rtcw on new devices

+ Fun and addictive

- Too fun and addictive

this is pretty cool but I actually kinda miss all the E3 cringe

a pretty good demo, would recommend buying the full game

Masterpiece