Deadly Shadows: Loved by gamers with terrible grammar.

You get the real thief experience when you play on expert with no killings allowed

So, after 4 days of intense play, over 20 hours of gameplay total, I finally finished Thief 3, so I thought I'd post my thoughts.
First, initially I was extremely annoyed with Garret's movement. I first downloaded the demo about a month ago, and I couldn't play for more than 5 minutes without getting sick of it (it's like Garrett's walking in mud or something :(). But thankfully, after installing the full game I found this "Thief minimalist" patch which corrects Garret's movement (still not as good as T1 and 2, but good enough) and makes the interface more like Thief 1 and 2, so that was a huge relief.
Well, here's my pros and cons.


Pros:

- Stunning graphics
- Extremely Realistic AI behaviour
- The possibility of exploring the City between missions
- The Cradle (need I say more ;))
- The Hammer-Pagan faction system
- Climbing gloves (I still prefer rope arrows, but those gloves are friggin awesome)
- The "steal - sell - buy system", and tools carrying over into all the missions
- The new enemies (I loved the statues)
- The new uses for moss arrows (especially choking opponents :ebil:)
- Hot Pagan chicks :cool:

Cons:

- Garret's clumsy movement (making it next to impossible to outrun opponents :()
- The crooked bow aim, which takes a while to get used to when you're used to Thief 1 and 2
- The dagger. Initially, before I actually used it, I liked the idea of a dagger (a stealthy, assassin weapon). In practice, it proved to be totally useless (except against the Cradle staff - if you crouch and stab them you can kill them easy and they can't reach you, or for backstabs, but I'd rather use the blackjack for these). Using it against sword guards, Hammers, Zombies, Haunts,etc. in frontal combat was pretty much suicide 8 times out of 10 for me. I hope they bring back the sword in Thief 4. You're completely disadvantaged against your opponents who have more reach.
- Little or no possibility of successful frontal combat (due to the absence of the sword), except near the end, when you can blackjack Gamall's statues and destroy them.
- Game interface: I like to see what my health level is all the time, not just when I'm getting my butt kicked :mad:. Thief 1 and 2 had a great interface - I found Thief 3's to be problematic and hard to adjust to when you've been playing the other games for over 8 years.
- With the previous point in mind, another mistake was that the creators of Thief 3 tried to make the game appealing to the general market, instead of taking the Thief community into consideration.

In any case, putting aside the cons, I was very impressed. I still give Thief 1 and 2 slightly higher marks for gameplay and weaponry, but Thief 3 was brilliant.

But I really like the story in Thief 3 (with the exception of Orland's stupidity with those notes). I actually like the story in Thief 3 more than that of Thief 2. I just am not too impressed with the game engine/maps they used to make the story unfold.