Will Thief steal your heart or your hard-earned cash?

A decade in the making, the long-awaited Thief reboot will arrive on 28 February 2014 for Xbox 360, Xbox One, PS3, PS4 and PC – and the reviews are out.

While the game hasn’t knocked reviewers off their seats, it has achieved a respectable average at the time of writing. User reviews have yet to come in, so it will be interesting to see how the gamers react.

Review scores have been all over the place from reputable publications, with highs in the mid-80’s, down to 40 and 35 from the likes of Giant Bomb and EGM. Opinion seems divided between the success of the “classic stealth” approach to gameplay design, versus the need to bring the game into the modern gaming era. The PC version in particular seems to suffer from a few annoying, yet not game-breaking bugs.

The Table below rounds up the aggregate scores:

Thief (2014) – Aggregate review scores (25-02-14)
Platform	GameRankings	Metacritic
PC	70.30%	69%
PS4	71.82%	70%
Xbox One	70.83%	70%

Thief is a reboot of the original PC series first released in 1998. Master thief protagonist Garret returns to The City to find it under the rule of a dictator named “The Baron”. The City has a Victorian-Steampunk aesthetic and is suffering a plague, under strict quarantine laws, and death is everywhere.

Garret sees an opportunity to make as much money from the situation as possible. While on a mission with his apprentice Arron, they stumble on a ritual being performed; this ritual, called the “Channelling of the Primal”, ends in disaster as Arron falls to her presumed death and horrors befall The City.

Below is a roundup of review opinion from a selection of reputable websites:

GameInformer (PS4) – 80%

If you’re content to save your game every couple minutes and enjoy a slower-paced stealth game, then Thief rewards you with plenty of moments so tense you might catch yourself holding your breath. Eidos-Montreal may have adhered too closely to the series’ roots, resulting in a reboot that suffers from classic problems like simplistic combat and trial-and-error sneaking missions. However, locked behind this old-school game design is a gem that stealth fans should eye up for their collection.

Joystiq (PC) – 4/5 stars

Thief is best when it sticks to the involving, slow-paced stealth that made its ancestor such a tense affair. In its subtle moments, Eidos Montreal gives your creeping a sense of closeness and texture, in a game where you almost always have your nose pressed against things. Much like Garrett, Thief succeeds when it’s quiet, fingers reaching out and almost – almost – touching an irresistible spread of glittering prizes.

The Thief in action

PC Gamer (PC) – 79%

Whether you are heartbroken or merely disappointed by Thief’s muddled sense of self will depend on exactly how invested you are in PC gaming’s creation myth. This is a decent stealth game that feels nice to play, and that’ll be enough for many – and if you feared the worst, you can rest a little easier. But the thing about evading disaster is that sometimes greatness slips away too.

GamesRadar (Xbox One) – 3.5/5 stars

Still, despite its uninspired storytelling and occasional bugs, Thief is a worthwhile adventure that anyone looking for a stealth-based experience will enjoy. The reboot doesn’t introduce any new concepts; it instead sticks to the simple, traditional shadow-skulking of the previous titles. But as any thief knows, the best payoff doesn’t come without a few risks, and the rebooted Thief prefers playing it safe over raking in the big haul.

IGN (PC, Xbox One, PS4) – 68%

Thief has some strong stealth mechanics going for it, and getting away unseen with a big haul of loot can be an enormous challenge, but doesn’t always put that to good use. Between the hit-or-miss missions is an extremely annoying city hub map and a weak story full of bland characters, and Garrett himself isn’t as sure-footed as a master thief ought to be. Ignoring the story and cherrypicking the best side missions is the best way to approach it.

Eurogamer (Xbox One) – 60%

At times the game suffers from a lack of ambition, placing far too much importance on the tiresome looting of endless cupboards and dressers in the vain hope that this will be enough to propel you forwards. In other places, Thief suffers from too much ambition, unable to draw its systems into a cohesive whole. Whether the game simply needed more time or entirely different foundations is never quite clear. Either way, it’s a game that adds up to less than the sum of its parts. Undeniably, Thief suffers greatly by comparison to Dishonored – its more coherent, more thoughtfully and successfully designed cousin, in whose shadow Garrett and his game now cringe.

Giant Bomb (PC) – 2/5 stars

Above all else, Thief’s greatest crime is one of boredom. Too much of its gameplay is bereft of excitement or satisfaction. Instead of feeling like a master thief, you mostly spend the game feeling like a generic first-person action hero who just happens to be especially bad at fighting people. Sneaking around Thief’s world is intermittently interesting, especially when the game puts its focus squarely on the act of stealing, but even those moments are frequently brought down by the game’s various rough edges. You have to work very hard to find the fun bits of Thief, and more often than not, the payoff just isn’t worth the effort.

EGM (Xbox One) – 35%

Even if future patches smooth out some of the glitches and technical wrinkles (I can confirm that the Day One update doesn’t—not by a long shot), there’s just not enough promise here to make waiting around worthwhile. As both a diehard fan of stealth games and someone who recently played through the original Thief games for the first time, it breaks my heart to say that this reboot does far more harm than if we’d gotten no new Thief at all. In a way, it all feels a little Frankenstein-ian, not just because Eidos Montreal seemingly stitched the game together from so many disparate parts, but also because both works shares the same lesson: Be careful about bringing something long dead back to life, lest you create an abomination.