Featured Image Credit: Megabit Publishing
I love a good stealth game, and I’ve found some of the best stealth games of the last few years to be refreshing in terms of the amount of freedom they offer.
Growing up with games like Thief: The Dark Project and Hitman: Blood Money, it was always fun to be given a mission, some intel on how to go about completing it, and then just thrown into the world to figure it out on my own.
OtherSide Entertainment's Thick As Thieves is the latest stealth game from the minds of Warren Spector (known for Deus Ex and Thief: Deadly Shadows) and Paul Neurath (Thief: The Dark Project and Thief II: The Metal Age), and in many ways it feels like a modern spiritual successor to the games I grew up with. And in other ways, it falls short of those expectations.
Thick As Thieves has some of the DNA of what made Thief and Deus Ex interesting stealth games. Its stealth mechanics are centred around light and sound, and each mission has you breaking into a high security building to steal a bunch of things.
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During each mission you’ll need to avoid guards, security systems, and other traps which can prevent you from getting away with the loot. Collecting random loot around the level will help you to pay for upgrades later on, with a mix of primary and secondary objectives bringing the biggest payout.
There are a handful of tools you can utilise to complete the mission, such as a smoke grenade to temporarily blind guards and a zipwire to quickly ascend to any height, each one offering new opportunities to get around the map and keep to the shadows.
Described as “an introductory taste” with the $5 price tag, it’s easy to see why it’s been priced as such. There are only two maps in the game, set in two very well-guarded landmarks, with a few randomised objectives which can change up the difficulty.
Altogether, it’s probably fine for the entry fee. When a brand new video game costs a fiver, you know you’re not going to be getting loads of content for your buck’s worth. And despite the advertised “four hour campaign”, I was able to squeeze out seven hours with Thick As Thieves thanks to the different mission varieties.
There are three difficulty levels, each one changing up guard routes and security configurations, making each contract a little more difficult as you progress. In addition to that, there are a few mission types which change up the type of loot you need to grab. A loose story ties together each mission in the form of different contracts that you’re sent on by your guildmaster.
It’s enough to pad out a decently-fun short campaign, giving you a few reasons to revisit each map several times with new objectives, security patterns, and randomised loot drops. But on the other hand, despite the talent behind Thick As Thieves, it’s clear that the game has had to compromise on its vision in order to fit within this advertised “introductory taste”.
As a big fan of Spector and Neurath’s previous work, as well as the immersive sim genre as a whole, I was excited to check out what seemed to be a great spiritual successor to games like Thief and Deus Ex. But functionally, there’s a lot about Thick As Thieves that also disappointed me.
For starters, guard AI is incredibly one-dimensional, and there’s very little risk involved with setting off alarms. Guards patrol on simple routes, pacing back and forth between two points, and will always return to that route no matter what, even if that involves you alerting them and temporarily stunning them. There are some games where I don’t mind this rigidity, but for a heist game with reactive systems, I was hoping there’d be a bigger focus on risks and consequences.
This is the same with other security systems that are located across each level, with measures like automatic turrets and laser trip wires rarely being a nuisance, easy to counter, and never making you feel like you’re being punished for being caught.
I understand that immersive sim developers have often had to compromise on some of these aspects in the past in order to balance fun with immersion (especially with a co-operative experience), but even on higher difficulties it feels as though this is incredibly easy to exploit. I’d have loved to see OtherSide take a more reactive approach to designing the game’s different adversaries, where real consequences happen for messing up stealth or botching the mission.
As for why Thick As Thieves feels so watered down, it most likely has to do with an announcement OtherSide made last month revealing that the game had switched direction. It was announced to be moving from a PvPvE stealth game where you and another player were tasked with competing against each other by robbing the same joint, into a cooperative experience where you assist each other instead.
Your mileage may vary on which version of the game sounds more interesting, but to me it reads like OtherSide realised the competitive multiplayer angle just wasn’t working, and decided to salvage what it could to get it out of the door. That’s why so much of the game feels like its vision has been compromised.
That’s not to say the co-op gameplay isn’t fun. During the review period, I was able to join a few other players, managing to successfully sneak through a few heists with very few issues. It’s here that I didn’t necessarily mind some of Thick As Thieves’ shortcomings. It’s pretty clear that if the game does find some kind of community, its biggest defenders will be those who play a lot of the multiplayer.
Okay, so Thick As Thieves is a solid foundation for a fun stealth game, and for the $5 entry fee I wasn’t necessarily expecting anything massive, but what you do have is something that feels a little half-baked in every form.
If anything, it makes me want to play a fuller version of the game with more maps, deeper stealth mechanics, and more level variety, but given that it feels a little rushed out the door, I’m not sure if OtherSide will have the budget to finish this. In other words, it’s fun for a fiver, but it does feel like a small chunk of something far bigger and more interesting that we may never get to see.
Pros: Fun co-op experience, interesting level design, cool art style
Cons: Lacking content, poor stealth mechanic design, lack of clear vision
For fans of: Thief, Deus Ex, Dishonored
Thick As Thieves launches on 20 May for PC. A review code was provided by the publisher. Read a guide to our review scores here.
