Electronic Gaming Monthly: Silent but Deadly

You can have your Sam Fishers, your Solid Snakes—they’re all charlatans in the eyes of Garrett, the O.G. medieval felon who’s been reigning king of the stealth-action genre since 1998. If you owned a PC, that is. Otherwise, it’s unlikely you’ve even heard of the Thief games he stars in, something creator Warren Spector (of Deus Ex fame) wants to change when Thief: Deadly Shadows hits Xbox in early summer.

Basic gameplay in Deadly Shadows remains unchanged from the PC titles—Garrett infiltrates buildings solo, sneaks past or dispatches any guards he runs into, uses assorted thieving tools to bypass security, and gathers other peoples’ loot. So what’s new? The viewpoint: You can switch between first-person view (ideal for making pinpoint archery headshots) and a more Sam Fisher–y (Splinter Cell) behind-the-back perspective at any time. Spector resisted the change at first. “Third person was a little hard for me to swallow,” he says, “but once the development team hacked that view into the game and made me play it, it felt like I was really grounded in the game world.”

As Garrett, you’ll need to flip between the two views frequently to one-up the guards, which are far smarter than anything encountered in other sneak-em-ups. Everything from missing valuables to doors left ajar could put them on your trail, making the ol’ blackjack-to-the-head shtick harder to pull off. Killing a sentry and dragging his corpse elsewhere won’t work, either; someone else could notice the grisly blood stains on the floor. Solution: Do what O.J. shoulda done—wash away the gore with special “water arrows.”

Breaking and Entering

Garrett can fight off guards in Deadly Shadows with a variety of weapons from the standard dagger, arrows, and blackjack to 007-like mines and flashbombs. This is a change in design philosophy from the last two games, in which Garrett was mostly helpless against concentrated enemy attacks. “You can’t get through this game by killing everything,” Spector says, “but when you’re spotted by a guard, I wanted another option for the player besides running and hiding for a minute and a half.”