Recent reviews by Gunblade

A masterpiece that will be hard for anyone to match.

Numbers... so many numbers!

I may give it a few more hours later and maybe i'll change my mind about it but so far...
Graphics look like an upscaled mobile game
Voice acting is mediocre at best
Story is predictable and generic
Combat looks decent
You have to wait several hours in queue to get in the game
Thanks to EAC you can't kill time with any other online game while in queue
It's a theme park MMO, which means you have to slowly crawl through the boring story on the way to end game with each character you choose to make.
After closing the game my GPU drivers are glitching out hard.
Given how boring and generic the story is, the only good part is that they cut off the initial section from lv1 to 10 and you just get a summary of the situation instead of wasting time playing that part
And the worst offender that i didn't get to yet but all reviews point to so far is that the end game is pay to not play... Which is one step above pay to win in my book.

When people say "games are art" this is the game they are talking about. I'm one of the most cold hearted people i know and it still made me cry!

The first thing you need to understand about Thief is that it is a product of its time so don't expect the streamlined mechanics of modern games. The controls are solid but there is no inventory management so you have to manually scroll up and down to find the thing you need and it takes several steps to perform actions that in modern games are done with one click. Still, if the clunkiness of its age is not an issue you are in for a very entertaining experience that rewards methodical planing and deliberate approach of every situation while (mainly at higher difficulties) punishes harshly rash actions. Also it is one of the very few games that actually acknowledges that the player has ears and uses clear sound cues to make you aware of what's around the corner and how far away it is, instead of the lazy approach of many modern games that follow the philosophy "the mc can detect enemies by sound so here's x-ray vision for you to see what the mc hears"
The only real problem, that was fortunately fixed in the second game, is that at times enemies can detect you or go on high alert at random even if you did nothing to cause it.

Overall its a good game that i can recommend to fans of JRPGs BUT it has one big flaw that you should look into before deciding to buy: the battle system.
While the idea behind the battle system is nice and the overall combat requires more tactics than many turn based JRPGs, the combat commands you can give to each unit are arbitrary. More often than not you don't have the option to have the unit act in the way you want it to for no apparent reason other than the game deciding that this particular option will not appear in this combat turn. I lost count of how many times i lost a battle because the option to have a unit do something was simply (and arbitrarily) not there.

Overall a great game that you have to play for just one more turn until you realize its morning. It has a few minor issues though that annoy me.
The first is how the combat animation for certain units can be stuck in a loop for way to long but that can be solved by simply selecting "quick battle" and skip the animation completelly.
The second and more important is how some unique units maintain their special traits when upgraded but others lose them. For example the chinese Chu ko nu maintains the double attack when upgraded to gatling and later machine gun and the same goes for the english longbow that maintains its +1 range when upgraded, but other units (like the byzantine cataphracts and dromon ships) lose their unique traits and become generic units when upgraded. There may be a mod that adresses this but i'm too lazy to look for it. If it exists and you find it, use it.

If you liked Dark Souls, you will love this!