The mother of stealth action games returns in this third iteration of Thief subtitled with Deadly Shadows. This is a good game with some flaws in it. Only for the patient players.

In Thief Deadly Shadows you again play as Garrett who is a master thief living in a surreal medieval world. He has also once been a member of a group called Keepers. The story itself unravels slowly, but expect to see prophecies, betrayals and lots of cynical monologue from Garrett. If you played the very first Thief then you will have some bonus kicks watching the ending cutscene after about 20 to 25 hours of gameplay.

Graphics themselves are not particularly impressive, but the lighting effects are great. Unfortunately these will cause the frame rate take a hit sometimes. Another annoying thing is those long loading times between different sections of the game. This takes you out from the experience and because of this the game world does not feel like one seamless world. Cutscenes move the story forward, but the animation in them is mostly bad.

Sound on the other hand is great and a big part is listening what different characters have to say. Voice acting is good and especially the voice of Garrett is something that you will remember after finishing the game. Even that the cutscenes don’t look good they still sound so.

Gameplay is either from a first or third person perspective. I personally recommend third person, because it gives you a larger view of your environment. Controlling Garrett works, but sometimes when for example there are a lot of different things on a table it can be very hard to take one particular loot from that table quickly. Other thing is that sometimes Garrett is somewhat stiff and hard to control, especially in instances where you need to do some jumping. Save system works so that you can save anywhere anytime you want. Unfortunately my game crashed just when I was saving after playing for 23 hours, so I had to reboot my Xbox and I realized that the game had erased my save file. For this reason it’s essential to use multiple saves all the time.

Thief is for stealth action game fans who have a patient personality. There is no fast paced action here.