This one's a toughie for me. Though I managed to get good mileage out of Thief Simulator (read: 13+ hours of gameplay) I can't in good conscience recommend buying it at full price. Even then I'm not sure how I feel about the final product. The gameplay is simple, repetitive, and plagued with bugs and issues that won't make you uninstall the game, per se, but it won't make you have any more fun.

I'm not going to go over the graphics because A) I rarely find them an integral part of the game and B) what you see in the footage is what you get. That being said, I think it's pretty telling when everything in the game looks like an asset bought from somewhere else. That's all I have on graphics--moving on.

Like the name of the game suggests, you play the titular 'Thief', a man of few words and a propensity for getting tazed. In debt to the Lombardi family, Thief needs to work off his debt by stealing a whole bunch of ♥♥♥♥. That's basically all the story you're gonna get without spoilers. Using various tools such as the lockpick (a classic), the hacking laptop (which allows you to hack consoles from far away), and even a scuzzy van, you'll terrorize three neighborhoods in your quest for, in the parlance of our times, 'fat stackz'. You choose the time and means of ingress and egress, the homeowners choose how they're going to keep you out. As you progress you'll learn to monitor the schedules of your would-be 'thievees' and use this knowledge to break in and break out. On paper this is a pretty cool game, but what limits it is the execution of said game mechanics and the overall jankiness of the game itself.

To begin, I think I missed an opening FMV or detail in the manual where it explains how Thief is Batman's protegee or a cyborg following Asimov's Laws or something and can not, and WILL NOT, harm a human being. There's no way to knock someone out, tie them up, or really do anything to manage them. In fact, hitting anyone with a brick, crowbar, or a car (which happens much more often than you think) will result in a Mission Failure and force you to reload a checkpoint. This doesn't ruin the game, of course, but it makes what I'm about to describe a bit more irritating. If someone sees you doing your job, you have three options: 1) Stick around and get tazed like an idiot, 2) Run to the hills waving your arms like a maniac, or 3) Hide in a closet, somehow avoid police detection, and resume your looting. I've never tried it in real life, but I will admit hiding INSIDE a burgled house when the cops arrived is one of the most ballsy ideas I've ever heard. In this game it works 9 out of 10 times, so you might as well take the XP penalty and retreat to a magical closet. Don't go thinking you have it easy, though--the police have the best response time ever (clocking in to about 2 seconds) and they will follow you over hill and ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ DELL to shove a tazer up your orifices. Sometimes tenants pack them too!

"Well okay," you might be huffing to yourself, "isn't that true of almost every stealth game?" You've got me there! However, Thief Simulator suffers from several bugs that, like I mentioned above, never really break your game, but do discourage you from playing it. Sometimes a guard will use psychic prediction and notice that you unlocked a door across the entire house. Sometimes guards and tenants will just throw their arms in the air, say "screw it" and teleport to another part of the house (read: your part of the house) because their AI lagged a little bit. Sometimes Thief's gout will act up and he won't be able to creep over a small piece of scenery such as a step on a stairwell or a bump on the ground. Sometimes even holding E to close something quietly will still slam the door/drawer/safe/car shut and alert everyone in the zip code. And SOMEtimes guards will channel John Wick and 360 Noscope you with a tazer from halfway across the map.

In conclusion, these are all issues that can be ironed out. Maybe I'm a little spoiled after playing games like Thief, Splinter Cell, and Dishonored, but my philosophy is that if you're going to make a stealth game, it's IMPERATIVE that any error is a fault of the player's--not the game. If a player makes too much noise or drifts into an enemy's line of sight, fine! If said enemy saw you because you got stuck on a .05inch divot on the ground when trying to creep by or an enemy saw you because he teleported in while you were headbutting a safe, that's a problem with the game. Because of these reasons, as well as the ultimately repetitive gameplay, I recommend doing what I did and getting this on sale. Don't expect something in the same vein as Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, though.