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Thief 2: The Metal Age Review
Noel Brady
00/12/0000
Thief 2: The Metal Age
When it was released in December '98, Thief: The Dark Project came as a welcome relief from the seemingly endless succession of first-person shooters flooding the market. In place of a poorly justified mish-mash of sc-fi cliches, it offered a gripping and involving plot. Instead of a string of labyrinthine levels packed with mindless monsters to kill, it faced you with a living, breathing fantasy world with realistic locations, populated by intelligent opponents. And, most importantly, it actively encouraged planning, forethought and restraint. As the master thief Garret, darkness was your friend and stealth your weapon. The result was a stunning game, and the birth of a new genre -- first-person stealth.
Set a year after the events of the original game, The Metal Age again casts you as the roguishly amoral Garret, but things have changed in the City. In the wake of Garret's victory over the mad Trickster god, new powers and factions have risen and struggle for dominance. The Mechanists, a fanatical splinter group of the Hammerites, have introduced strange new technology driven by steam and electricity. The Pagans, last remnants of the Trickster's forces, perform terrorist attacks and spread anti-technology propaganda. And the mysterious Keepers continue to watch and observe events from a distance.
In the midst of this chaos, Garret is just trying to make a dishonest living, stealing from the rich and giving to himself. But when the new elected sheriff starts taking an interest in your business, you find yourself drawn into a deadly plot and forced to test your skills against an increasingly dangerous series of challenges. In a perfect example of the old adage, ''if it ain't broken, don't fix it'', the basic structure of The Metal Age is almost identical to the original Thief. The game is split into a series of missions, each beginning with a cut scene that advances the story and explains the background of the coming job.
Depending on the difficulty level you select, each mission has a number of objectives that must be met, and before you start you can spend any loot you, erm, ''acquired'' in the previous mission to kit yourself out with a variety of handy tools and items. But that's not to say that there's nothing new in The Metal Age -- far from it. Instead of coming up with new ways to present the action, Looking Glass has wisely concentrated on expanding and improving the gameplay itself.
The most obvious improvement lies in the graphics engine -- the one weakness of the original. Rebuilt from the ground up, the visuals are faster, smoother and clearer. The new engine runs in 16-bit colour, with improved lighting, translucency and particle effects. Likewise, the ploygon count of the guards, robots and the rest have been doubled, and the range of animation greatly imrpoved. The result is that The Metal Age looks almost as good as it plays.
Almost, because to be honest, it would be all but impossible for the graphics to match the quality of the gameplay in Thief 2. Looking Glass admits it was a little concerned whether players would really enjoy the stealth element of the first game, and so provided a mix of sneaking and fighting. Reassured by the success of the original, it has pulled out all the stops this time around. As well as offering you a new range of cool gadgets and toys to play with, Thief 2 faces you with a host of new challenges, from automised security systems to steam-driven robot guards.
Completing missions requires even more planning and original thinking than before, and the stealth element has been emphasised above all else. What stands out, though, is the design of the missions. Although the early stages of the game see you performing fairly straightforward break-ins, as the story progresses you have to take on ever more complex tasks, from framing an enemy with planted evidence to a daring midnight flight across the rooftops of the city. Not only are the locations imaginative and cunningly designed, the locations themselves are thoroughly convincing and authentic.
In many ways Thief: The Dark Age was one of the most effective role-playing games ever to appear on the PC. To succeed, you had to immerse yourself in the role of a thief, thinking, planning and acting like one. Thief 2 takes this to new levels, and while the satisfaction you gain from indulging the underhand side of your nature may be dubious, it's also immensely rewarding and great fun. This truly is the sneakiest game available on the PC, and is also one of the best designed and most enjoyable releases of the year so far.
