Thief

I was hating it and still kinda do. no manual jumping. having multiple discreet actions contextually squished into one button sucked. the way rope arrows worked sucked. That lights out puzzle in the clockmakers house sucked. the two "boss" fights REALLY sucked. I was lukewarm, then started doing the client and basso jobs and almost started diggin' it. The map sucks major ass. Even near the end of the game I was still struggling to do simple navigation from a to b. Mainly because it shows the whole city but to reach certain parts you have to go through a window and it never feels intuitive. It doesn't show elevation well. So I was doin' the side jobs and enjoying myself a little. It had a spark of some of the humor that thief used to have. Then did mission 6 where you return to the baron's mansion. This level was getting my shit going. I explored every nook and cranny. Then it got to the end of the mission and had this awful escape while everything is on fire part. YUCK. Then it got worse. The Cathedral level had me damn near furious and not giving a fuck. The boat level had that fucking stupid boss fight.

played on PC. graphically great. Then it would go to a pre-rendered cutscene and the image quality and framerate went right in the shitter.

Story had me really not giving a shit. You were supposed to care about the girl but as far as my experience with her she was annoying in the prologue and then she was annoying in some slow-ass cinematic hallucination sequences and then she was really annoying in that final boss fight. Narratively clunky. No real motivation or actual villain. I'm sitting here having just beaten the game and still don't understand what the gloom was. The story as I can recall was: Girl falls into laser beams. Gets imbued with primal power which is somehow the spiritual embodiment of the city itself. So if she dies the city will physically unravel. This Orion guy tried to sacrifice her but I went into some supernatural mode and stole a necklace out of his hand. Then he kidnaps her like Bluto and hides out on a boat. Then the lady gives him the ol' Last Crusade "chose poorly" diet. Then I have to run around a room picking up glowing stones. then shes hanging from my hand. Then the Orion guy puts his hand on the book and she drops. What the fuck was this game?

Remember at the end of Deadly Shadows where the little girl pickpockets Garret? Why wasn't that a jumping off point for this game?

The AI was never dependable. Near the beginning of mission 7 I wanted an archer to move so I threw a bottle. He does nothing. I throw it right in front of him. He does nothing. I can't get near him because there's a torch he will reignite and a fucking raven in a cage i can't take out without him being omniciently aware of my location.

Hated all the overwrought animations. You could never quickly blackjack a guy unless he was seated. It was always a canned sequence. When you got a unique loot item it always did a stupid animation that blocked you from doing anything else. YUCK. Checking all the drawers in a desk was always slow and tedious. I thought I understood the lockpicking but I don't really think I did. You rotate and if you go slowly you might hear a click which means you went past the spot and then you wiggle it in a circle until the dot lights up. I think? Who cares? I finally beat this hunk of shit so I can uninstall it.

When I first got it I used a custom difficulty. I chose not to have a reticule for my bow thinking the goddamned weapon would have an aimer on it like in the old games. This was not the case. Using water arrows was always trial and error. I got to the brothel mission and then said fuck it and restarted with the reticle on.

Y'know what else sucked? All the regular ass swearing. Just made this dumb game seem even dumber. If they said Taffer in this game it sure as shit wasn't obvious.