Review

Wow, I must be getting really jaded in my old age. Thief 2 stopped being fun about 2/3 of the way through. I played a few more missions after that, but by about 3/4 of the way through, I couldn't muster up the motivation to finish it. I feel somewhat guilty, since I obviously had many of the same complaints about the original Thief as did a lot of people, and Looking Glass clearly paid attention to those complaints. Unfortunately, the manner in which they addressed Thief's problems resulted in a sequel that is very surprisingly less fun.

The most significant complaint I had about the original Thief was the intermingling of the thieving missions with non-thieving, tomb-raider-esque missions. Well, the tomb raider missions have been eradicated entirely in Thief 2. In their place is a more homogeneous set of missions which admittedly stick closer to the core game design but leave the game with a monotonous feeling. The impression I got with the original Thief was that Looking Glass, or perhaps their publisher Eidos, didn't have complete faith in the new type of sneaker gameplay and saw it as a risk. To hedge their bets, they sprinkled in some mission design that showcased more traditional action-adventure style play. Turns out they should have had more faith, as the sneaker play could indeed carry the show by itself, but the other missions did have the nice side effect of keeping the game from becoming rote over the course of the campaign. With almost all of Thief 2's missions following a fairly basic template, it does what Thief never did: becomes boring.

This is exacerbated by the length of many of the missions in Thief 2, some of which are just obnoxiously long. A good portion of the player reward in the Thief games comes from the end mission summaries, the cutscenes, and the ability to spend your cleverly obtained cash on supplies for the next mission. Thief 2 makes these rewards fewer and farther between, something that I think goes against a game design golden rule: Reward the player early and often. This also flies in the face of what I feel is one of the game's smartest design decisions: none of your equipment carries over from mission to mission. 'Use it or lose it' is the game's motto, and I think it frees the player from the anxiety of hyper-conservatism. As the player, you're encouraged to do well during each mission because the more loot you find, the more stuff you can buy for the next mission. Simultaneously, you're encouraged to be a bit more uninhibited and spontaneous with your supplies because you know that at the end of the mission, your backpack might as well be empty because you're going to start from scratch in the next mission. I can really appreciate this because I'm exactly the kind of gamer that suffers from hyper-conservatism. I'm the kind of guy that would torture himself through 12 missions without using a single water arrow just in case for some unforeseen reason I might need 89 water arrows in the last mission. I'll wax Freudian for a moment and explain that this tendency stems from my deep abhorrence of repetitious gaming. I don't trust most game designers to prevent me from painting myself into a corner, and there's always this fear that if I don't conserve, I might find myself in an inescapable circumstance late in the game wherein I'm forced to replay a significant portion of the game. Thief 1 & 2 relieved me of this pressure by promising me that I all I had to do was finish any given mission and it didn't matter how much of my stuff I used or didn't use, there was the guarantee of a reset before the next mission. It might sound minor, but it has a dramatic effect on the manner in which I mentally approached the entire game.

Now to tie this back to the topic of mission length, it should be obvious what effect longer and longer missions will have. The shorter the missions, the more liberal and confident you can be in the use of your equipment. The longer the missions, the less confident and subsequently more conservative you're likely to be. For example, if you possess a single gas arrow, are you more or less likely to use it 20 minutes into a 40 minute mission or 1 hour into a 3 hour mission? Thief 2 thus became less and less enjoyable as it became clear that I needed to manage my equipment for substantially longer periods of time. Even worse, Thief 2 actually breaks its implicit promise to the player on several occasions by transitioning to another mission without allowing you to restock. This violates another game design golden rule: Never break a promise to the player. The Thief player knows that they should make the most of their current inventory before the mission is over because they start from scratch; but when Thief 2 violates this it undermines the player's confidence in the game and its ability to reward them for following its rules.

Moving onto a different topic, I think I know another huge reason why Thief 2 wasn't as much fun for me as Thief. Quite frankly, I didn't like how the concept of the "Metal Age" affected the level design and play mechanics. I didn't care for the over-abundance of electrical lighting. One of the coolest things about the environments in Thief was that almost all of the environments were torch-lit, and therefore manipulatable by the player. In fact, I suspect that a good deal of the frustration and malice that got directed at the 'tomb-raider' missions in Thief was attributable less to the objectives and more to the fact that the player was taken out of the environments in which they could employ their tools: the water arrow, the blackjack, the moss arrow, etc.. The same goes for much of the environments in Thief 2. The influence of the Metal Age has resulted in a much more modern feeling to the levels, and consequently a diminishing in value of some of the tricks of Garrett's trade. This just didn't sit well with me, and I found myself consistently less endeared to the levels.

The last major issue I have is again related to the 'Metal Age' motif: the mechanist robots. This was another design decision that rubbed me the wrong way. The robots had no personality, no sense of real interaction with their surroundings. They made the game feel much more clinical and scripted, which is something the original Thief avoided. Looking Glass listened to the feedback from Thief and concluded that nobody liked the haunts, zombies, burricks, and bugmen. So they got rid of all of them and put robots in their place. Now, I'll be the first to give praise that I didn't have to kill any innocent burricks in Thief 2, but the robots just didn't work for me, and I think a huge reason for this impression is that the robots aren't scary.

In fact, I think herein lies the truly fatal flaw in Thief 2: it isn't scary. Neither Thief nor Thief 2 are overly deep in their gameplay. The series is novel, innovative, and polished, but in the end it isn't the thieving that holds the roof up, it's the atmosphere and the style. I played all the way through Thief despite it's sinusoidal doses of frustration because it was so moody and so scary and at times scalp-tinglingly eerie. Thief put the player in situations that generated palpable fear, enhanced, I'm sure, by the fact that almost nobody saw it coming. Who expected to play a game about a thief and get scared witless? The atmosphere is what got me to the end of Thief, and it was the lack of atmosphere that kept me from finishing Thief 2. Sure, Thief 2 tightened the screws on the thieving gameplay, but it dropped most of its predecessor's style on the floor. This was due in part to the robots, and in part to the new modernist bent to the level design.

Thankfully, Looking Glass was nice enough to leave all of the game's cutscenes in an accessible format, so when I decided not to play through to the end, I could just watch the last few cutscenes to finish out the story arc. In fact, I went back and watched all of the cutscenes from Thief again, just for fun. They're that good.

I also want to make a quick note of something for which I was very grateful: in Thief 2, the choice to progress through missions with or without killing anyone is now present in essentially all the missions, and is independent of the other objectives. In Thief, this gameplay choice was frequently coupled to other aspects of the objectives, so if you wanted to see everything that a mission had to offer, you were often forced to accept the 'no-kill' clause.

Unfortunately, something from Thief that didn't get fixed but should have was the mantling interface. I can't tell you how many times I had to reload the quicksave because I couldn't get Garrett into an opening in a wall or window because I jumped instead of mantled, or because I crouched in order to fit through the obviously large enough opening, but the collision physics wouldn't let me through because there was the slightest lip to the foot of the opening. This was incredibly frustrating.

Is Thief 2 fun? As always, it depends on you. I'd recommend it to anyone who liked Thief, but it's not a better game. It has more imaginative mission objectives, but you may or may not like the atmosphere. Lamps instead of torches; robots instead of haunts; a few new gadgets and some long, huge levels. And it's not scary, so either play it for the pick-pocketing or don't play it at all.

Tips

• If you need to walk off of a ledge and land quietly, crouch down first, and walk off while crouched. You'll make virtually no noise when landing (assuming you didn't fall too far) and will stand up automatically after you land.