Thief VR: Legacy of Shadow Review – A Groundbreaking Stealth Franchise Returns
I had to rub my eyes and check I wasn’t dreaming when Thief VR: Legacy of Shadow was announced during State of Play earlier this year.
Thief is a series that I hold dear to my heart. The classic games developed by Looking Glass Studios remain as probably the best stealth games of all time, delivering a type of experience in 1998 that a lot of modern stealth games still can’t really seem to accomplish. Seriously, go play Thief: The Dark Project, and once you get over the dated visuals, I promise you’ll have a great time with it.
That can’t be a great start to a review if I’m already recommending you to go play another game that isn’t the one I’m reviewing, but there is some important context needed here—Thief VR: Legacy of Shadow isn’t a bad virtual reality game, but I don’t think it’s a great continuation of the series.
Over 10 years after that rather botched reboot from Square Enix, I was hoping that whoever was in charge of the next Thief revival might have been able to take extra care to pay respects to the original games while also being able to carve it as a worthy modern reboot.
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After playing through Thief VR: Legacy of Shadow, I have to say that this isn’t the revival long-time fans are hoping for, but that doesn’t mean it’s something we should completely write off. That would be doing a disservice to what is on display here.
Thief VR: Legacy of Shadow puts you in the role of Magpie, a young orphaned thief who was raised on the streets of The City, performing various odd jobs just to get by. When she comes across the mysterious Mechanical Eye of legendary thief Garrett (with Stephen Russell coming back to voice the character after 21 years), she’s thrown into a larger conspiracy that looms over the metropolis.
I’ll say it: Thief VR: Legacy of Shadow is a decent VR game. What that means to me is allowing a game to have intuitive motion controls, with more emphasis on controls that imitate real-life movement without feeling janky or relying too much on button presses, along with good spatial sound design and a sense of place to help immerse me in that world.
Thief VR: Legacy of Shadow does exactly that. Built from the ground-up as a VR title, the game is clearly trying to do its own thing using the Thief setting as set dressing. And while I heavily dislike this method considering the franchise hasn’t had a decent entry in decades, I will say that a game like this does work quite well as a standalone VR title.
For starters, Thief’s premise isn’t a terrible idea for a virtual reality experience. Slow movement, manipulating the environment to conceal your presence, and having full control over how you can hide from enemies is a great fit for VR. These are all aspects of the series that feel immersive when you’re suddenly using motion controls and tracking to represent them.
And Thief VR: Legacy of Shadow does that really well. You physically pull open drawers to search them, use both your hands to lockpick doors, and have to slowly and silently pickpocket guards without them noticing. I love how well these mechanics work in VR compared to simply pressing a button on your controller, and it makes you feel so much like a badass thief in the same way the original games did.
And I absolutely love using some of these mechanics. Using the bow, where you need to physically nock your arrow and draw the bowstring back, can feel really satisfying when attacking from the shadows. With limited ammo, you need to make every shot count, and levels feel designed around avoiding enemies rather than taking them all head-on.
I’m in two minds about the openness of Thief VR’s levels, though. The first few missions are rather linear, where for the most part you’re on a set path with very little variety in how you want to proceed. Each stage is rigidly structured to keep you on this path, and you don’t really get a chance to explore. To me, Thief is all about scouting out a location, finding hidden passageways or areas, and tackling an objective in multiple ways.
This changes about halfway through the game, and you’re given a little bit more freedom on how to move around each level. You start getting missions where you have multiple ways of entering and exiting, and are presented with different opportunities to deal with guards. If you’re put off by the linearity of the earlier missions, some of the later ones may satisfy your desire for more varied level design.
It’s not perfect, of course. The levels still feel rather lacking in terms of depth, and they do feature some unfortunate carryovers from the 2014 reboot, like only allowing rope arrows to be attached to fixed wooden beams, or guard AI being rather wonky (why do they reset to their default positions, even after being alerted?).
The game is a VR experience first and foremost, designed for shorter sessions by keeping you on track, and I wasn’t expecting it to have the same depth that the original Looking Glass Studios titles offered. But even with it being built for VR, I can’t help but feel like the complexity of Thief as a series is something that would still translate quite well to virtual reality.
I mean, please let me try and break the levels, let me pull tricks on the AI, let me find numerous ways to exploit the game’s systems in interesting and unexpected ways. Putting the novelty of VR aside, there’s still a relative simplicity to it that feels like untapped potential, and there isn’t really as much complexity to Thief VR’s levels as fans may expect.
So, perhaps Thief VR: Legacy of Shadow isn’t the triumphant return the series needed, even if the game itself is somewhat fine. In essence, virtual reality fans may enjoy it, while long-time fans hoping for a comeback in the vein of the original series may be disappointed. I hope whoever at Eidos is in charge of the Thief brand doesn’t shelve it for another decade, because I’m still holding out hope that the franchise will have a decent revival worthy of the Looking Glass Studios titles.
Pros: intuitive VR controls, excellent mechanics, immersive sound design
Cons: downplayed immersive sim elements, lacklustre enemy AI
For fans of: Hitman VR, Espire 2, Assassin's Creed Nexus VR
Score: 7/10
Thief VR: Legacy of Shadow is available to play on PlayStation VR2 (version tested), Meta Quest 2, Meta Quest 3, and SteamVR. A review code was provided by the publisher. Read a guide to our review scores here.