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Dayport: a plague city, where the poor creep and mourn, the candles tremble and snuff, and where, in the tallest clock tower, arch-thief Garrett dusts his jewellery display cases and plots his next job. Absent for years in a dreamless sleep, Garrett has awoken to find his city - and the game in which it features - has changed a great deal since 1998, when Looking Glass defined first-person stealth with Thief: The Dark Project. Video games of this kind of breadth and ambition cost a great deal more to make these days, for one thing. It's a financial pressure that has brought the original game's designs into closer alignment with current fashions. So the cobbled, rat-piss-stained streets of The City act as a hub from which Garrett heads out into chaptered missions; these carefully funnel him down corridors of gameplay which offer little capacity for diverse approaches. Each mission has a number of high-value unique items to steal (around six per stage) but aside from these ingeniously hidden secrets, you head in a straight line towards the scooting mission marker as it leads you on towards the next objective. Often a mission builds to a crescendo in which you flee a collapsing building or try to outsprint wildfire in a Call of Duty-esque, summer-blockbuster choreographed sprint. Thief's familiar props are present - rope arrows that can be fired to create routes to new areas; glimmering gold wall plaques put up by the council that can be unscrewed and lifted; glow-eyed zombies with dripping fingers - but they're joined by a raft of new imports designed to broaden the game's appeal.
While it's possible to play Thief on the offensive, knocking out security guards by dropping chandeliers onto their heads with a well-aimed arrow or choking them from behind, this is a game that rewards uncompromising stealth. You learn guards' patrol patterns and dart from shadow to shadow, ensuring you're downwind of any guard dog's twitching nose and taking care not to knock over the farcical amount of pots and crockery left lying about. Perhaps you clamber onto a nearby wall in order to gain better vantage point.
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