Graphics and Sound

Thief: Deadly Shadows is a beautiful game in more ways than one. The gameplay is nicely complemented by the fantastic graphics. Pixel Shaders and normal maps are used liberally, interplaying with the lighting engine in ways that no game could before DirectX 8 hardware became commonplace. While I'll stop short of suggesting Thief has lighting as good as Doom III, it is quite close at times.

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In fact, it's a lot easier to simply name the few places where the graphics stumble, rather than praise the whole package. For starters, Thief goes a little too far out of its way to highlight loot. Previous games would make loot somewhat brighter, Deadly Shadows makes it glow and twinkle in an obnoxious bright blue color. That same color is used to highlight items that Garrett is about to interact with, like bodies to pick up, doors to open and candles to put out.

Other weak spots bring the Xbox to mind, unfortunately. With its 733MHz Pentium III processor, the Xbox is obviously incapable of pushing as many triangles around as a PC is, and there are times this shows in Thief. The low-poly character designs aren't that noticeable in motion, but give someone a knock on the head, get close to pick the body up and it's obvious how few triangles are used on even major characters. Animations are generally smooth, but ironically as games get better at drawing human characters, we're starting to notice the many minor miscues which separate us from our digital brethren. The unnaturally stiff backs, the expressionless faces, the exactly repeated motions - these all become painfully obvious particularly in a game like Thief where the player often spends minutes doing nothing but looking at his enemy and planning a way around him.

Where we constantly have our minds boggled is when it comes to game performance. Why does Thief: Deadly Shadows run fairly slowly on a system at least twice as powerful as an Xbox? We're looking at Far Cry performance with Deus Ex graphics - there's no justification for that.

Deadly Shadows has really nailed its audio on the spot. ION delivered Garrett's voice once again, but also painted in all the subtle touches that made the first two games a joy. Footsteps are just loud enough to tell how loud Garrett is moving or how far away an approaching guard is. Locks rattle just right as you're picking at the right spot. The music is eerie and tense. Thief is really all about the ambience and atmosphere, which is helped immeasurably by prodigious though occasionally spotty voice acting, the guard conversations their muttered complaints as they trudge around on cold nights and generally talk to themselves a lot like insane people. Maybe that's a bad example, but yes, Thief: Deadly Shadows delivers in sound.