The infamous bloom from D:IW makes a return, and while in DE it seemed to give everything a cartoony look here it works very well. By smearing the lines and textures the bloom makes things look that little bit more organic, thereby clawing back a good bit of the immersion that can be lost to the previously mentioned problems. It does remain a matter of taste however, but at least the option to turn it on and off is there. Throughout my time with T:DS I was pleasantly surprised and impressed with what the developers had done with the engine. I was willing to believe that I was creeping around real environments, and while the layout of some of the levels is bewildering their design and the architecture within is generally of a high standard. One thing that has suffered greatly from this detail, and this is an issue for which the must take full blame, is the scope of the individual levels. Not only are they overly claustrophobic but also they tend to be shockingly small in the amount of area that they cover. This means lots of loading screens, even in what should be a relatively small level. Fortunately the load times themselves aren't too bad, say 10-15 seconds, but they do break up the flow of the game. I'm surprised and disappointed that Ion Storm didn't find a way to stitch the levels together for the release.

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T:DS seems to allow for a more gung-ho approach than was previously possible, although Garret is still about as hardy as a pagonia in a hurricane and will topple over dead after just a few quick thrusts of a guard's sword. The AI of the world's inhabitants is well geared towards group reactions. This means that you won't be able to take on guards in a piece meal fashion. All it takes is one guard to go from suspecting an anomaly to spotting Garret for an entire garrison to go into full search and destroy mode. As a result it is imperative that you avoid any tussles with the guards when playing the larger levels. Getting comfortable with the way the AI works and coming to understand the various fudges that are necessary for preventing the gameplay from descending into an impossible, anarchistic mess is a fairly long process. Characters will give you hints about their current state by the way they behave and from the snippets of conversation and solitary musings that you can overhear.

T: is a very atmospheric game which has just one too many small faults to make its gameworld a compellingly believable one. T: DS makes good use of sound but I experienced too many occasions where the placement of sounds coming out of my 5.1 speakers didn't match up to what was going on in the gameworld. Still, despite its numerous annoying faults and oversights I enjoyed playing T: DS. The Thief series made stealthy gameplay into the popular feature that regularly creeps its way into games were you wouldn't expect to see it. And while young pretenders such as have taken the stealthy idea and incorporated it into a more orientated style of game, Thief: Deadly Shadows delivers the kind of stealthy (in)action that fans of the series look for. A lot of time spent playing T: DS is spent not actually doing anything, as you try to suss out patrol patterns or wait for someone to move away from a window or chest. Even so, things can get incredibly tense, especially as you know detection could spell the end of Garret's career.

T: DS, like its two predecessors, is not the kind of game that will appeal to everyone. If, however, you like the idea of playing the role of a master thief caught up in events beyond his ken and you are willing to forgive some of the technical problems the developers were unable to overcome then you should be able to lose yourself in Thief: Deadly Shadows for many hours. And as a bonus, by the time this review finally hits the web, you may even be able to buy the game at a discounted price.

83%

By Sam Gibson

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