Thick As Thieves Review

I’ve always had a fondness for stealth games, from Metal Gear Solid and Splinter Cell to Dishonored and, more fittingly, Thief. Thick As Thieves comes as something of a spiritual successor to the Thief series, even down to sharing developers, such as Warren Spector, the mind behind Deus Ex.

Thick As Thieves takes you into Kilcairn, a town in Scotland during the 1910s. You begin the game joining the Thieves Guild, and most of the game revolves around doing tasks for said Guild and exploring a deeper mystery revolving around a stolen item. It’s a simple story, and one that I think suffers due to development changes, but it’s enough.

Initially, Thick As Thieves was conceived as an extraction-based heist game, but towards the end of development. shifted to a more typical single-player/co-op experience. I won’t deny, I’m a little tired of the saturation of the extraction game, but in this case, I wish it hadn’t changed.

You play as one of two thieves: The Spider or The Chameleon, each with a small loadout of unique abilities, and are sent into one of two maps to complete a series of contracts. These contracts typically consist of stealing an item (or items), and escaping. Along the way, you’ll find additional loot and clues, which help direct you to your primary goals. It’s not as simple as just getting in and out, though, as you’ll face opposition from the Constables and their tools, such as turrets, magical eye cameras, and even ghostly guards.

The level design is the best part of the game by a decent margin; The maps are both pretty big and have a lot of potential options for infiltration and exploration. Tasks will often take you all around the levels searching for clues and keys, which makes the levels themselves feel very well realised.

I really quite like the two levels we have, and the moment-to-moment gameplay is genuinely quite solid, but there are some issues which break down the very core of Thick As Thieves, and turn a potentially very good experience into a lacklustre one.

Stealth games have some unique balancing difficulties, the main one being disempowerment. You’re not an assassin nor a supernatural being; you’re simply a thief, going up against a very well-guarded building. You’re meant to feel weak; it’s a key part of the tension that makes stealth games work so well. If there is no threat, whether that's enemies being too easy to defeat or a lack of punishment, that tension will disappear. In this case, this is too true.

The enemy AI isn’t particularly intelligent, and there are no universal alarm phases/threats, so being seen isn’t really an issue. It’s very easy to break line of sight and hide for a few seconds before returning back to where you were, and if you are caught out and killed, then you’ll drop your loot and respawn 15 seconds later. Getting back to your death location to pick your loot back up is nothing more than a minor inconvenience.

Exploration isn’t all too worthwhile either, as money isn’t particularly valuable in the long run. It’s required to buy additional tools (which are also locked behind progress) or cosmetics, many of which weren’t all too interesting anyway.

I pin a lot of these issues on the relatively last-minute pivot away from multiplayer. Dropping loot on death and timed respawns both would work well in a competitive setting, and the repetitive tasks would gain much-needed depth with the added unpredictability of opposing players.

As it stands, Thick As Thieves is a perfectly fine, but unremarkable stealth game. I can’t say the game would be better as a multiplayer title, as execution matters heavily, but it would be more interesting at the very least. There’s a solid foundation here, the current set of tools isc functionally interesting enough, and the general stealth systems work well, utilising the same light gem style system as the Thief games.

As a whole, Thick As Thieves is a game worth keeping an eye on; I see potential, and it’s generally decent fun, but it’s nothing special. It needs to carve out its specific place in the genre rather than staying in the shadows of its peers.