thief simulator - 2/10
i can't even in good faith call it 'at least functional'
god, what a let-down. i really wanted to enjoy my time with thief simulator after having watch jerma have a minor meltdown with it, but it's just... so shoddy. i mean, what else do i expect of the pedigree of these sorts of "simulator" games?
i don't know if its my game specifically being bugged, but the draw distance on everything is so criminally low that its virtually impossible to actually scout ahead from any great distance, and yet simultaneously so frustrating to get close due to you being unable to see obstacles until the last second and incurring random penalties from like $1-$5 all the way up to a reset to checkpoint because some lobotomized snail that walks as a man decided to conjure himself into being in front of your car. on a sort of general level, as well, the whole game very much speaks to that sort of 2014 simulator aesthetic; that is to say, it looks like a unity asset flip that you'd find on the app store calling itself gib tank automobile or some shit. i am a strong believer in the concept of your game not needing to look good, as long as it looks unique. well, this game entirely miserably fails on both of those fronts, doubly so due to its visuals, again, not functioning properly. the pop-in is just additional migraine fuel on top of the eyestrain already provided.
and the gameplay? well, its slow, seems to randomly and arbitrarily decide that tenants are either blind, deaf and dumb, or alternatively Fucking Superhumans depending on the coin toss, and it rolls an extra d20 to determine if it'll be so kind as to even show you the awareness indicators before it happens. as opposed to having a strong toolkit with which it builds levels and challenges, you get to drive (incidentally, whoever programmed the car physics might want to take a driving test at some stage before they endanger somebody; if this is how they think brakes work in a car, i truly do not want to even imagine what its like to be in their vehicle) to a neighbourhood to run around in and build up your skill tree because it's always fucking skill trees. want the next tier of lockpick? got the scratch for it? too bad, because you haven't hit an arbitrary XP cap to be able to get the correspondent element on the skill tree to be able to use that yet, sorry. im sure that once you build your character it might be good, but at the end of the day... i'm not picking up a game called "thief simulator" for an 80-hour thieving RPG where i have to grind stats to be a thief. i was getting it - and this might blow you away, this one - to thieve things. turns out all it thieved was my bloody time!
fugly, boring and caught in trappings of games that this shouldn't be. overall, i am rather disappointed with thief simulator. oh, well, back to dark mod fan missions.