Thief is out of the shadows; here’s our Thief review.
Garrett’s had plenty of enemies in his time, but once their suspicions have been sated and their patrol routines resumed, they’ve tended to let bygones be bygones (or, if things have gone wrong, headwounds be headwounds). He’s never had to deal with the sort of awkward encounters Sam Fisher did in Splinter Cell: Convinction: “Oi, Garrett! Remember the guard you biffed at Lord Bafford’s Manor? That was me, taffer!”
That’s apparently set to change in nu-Thief, where one high-ranking City official holds the ludicrously specific title of Thief Taker General. His goal is to hunt and hang every burglar in the city, and hang most emphatically one man: Garrett. Us. Gulp. Here’s him trailered.
It’s still odd to see Garrett’s face on a wanted poster, given that for several years we never really saw it at all. But the performance capture era of storytelling must have what it needs, I guess – and it’s nothing that Deadly Shadows didn’t do first.
The Thief Taker General is “corrupt to the bone”, say Eidos Montreal. His black-and-white classism extends to an extortionate ‘black tax’ on The City’s underclass denizens. Those that can’t pay hang; those that steal to pay also hang.
So what was the horrible hook business about? The Thief Taker General runs an operation on the side, where plague victims are collected and their loved ones disinherited of their jewellery, clothes, prosthetic limbs or expensive teeth. And thus we ask WHO IS THE REAL THIEF HERE, pondering the injustice of it all while we cut another painting from its frame.
Our Steve reckoned in his Thief hands on that nicking stuff is by far the game’s strongest suit, as you’d hope – but that the bits in between, including the main objectives, sometimes devolved into excitable drivel. Do you think you lot can live with that?