Thief VR: Legacy of Shadow Is Too Basic to Be Worthy of the Name (Review)

A bad reboot shouldn’t be a death sentence. After waiting in the shadows for a decade, the misguided and shallow 2014 Thief damned the seminal stealth series to obscurity once again just after it had found the light. Thief VR: Legacy of Shadow is yet another attempt at reviving the series after a decade-long gap, opting to go down the virtual reality route over dabbling once again in reboot territory. But even though pickpocketing has never been this involved, Legacy of Shadow is hardly more than a simplistic and dated stealth game.

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The intimacy afforded to Thief through the VR medium isn’t frivolous enough to gloss over, though. Tiptoeing up to an oafish guard and manually nicking his coin purse before slinking back into the void is more engaging because it actually takes a deft touch; a sloppily outstretched hand will result in an alert. Pinching out a candle, literally whistling to distract a nearby goon, chucking objects to manipulate patrol patterns, and sifting through drawers for loot are all actions that are more immersive than simply holding down a button (especially when the occasionally wonky yet mostly effective “Immersive” setting that turns on the headset’s microphone is flipped on). Interactions like these take common stealth tropes and benefit from the novelty of having to pantomime them in VR.

Rating: 3/5

Pros	Cons
Sneaking around and stealing can be thrilling.	Guard AI is extremely limited, relatively stupid, and sometimes buggy.
	Most levels are frustratingly linear.
	Stealth gameplay hardly evolves or gets more complex.

Thief VR: Legacy of Shadow‘s Mechanics Are Too Simple

Legacy of Shadow, though, is not much more than these basic stealth tropes. None of these mechanics evolve throughout the game or are presented in an interesting fashion. Clubbing an unaware thug in the back of the head never grows in complexity, nor does picking pockets, stealing loot, or extinguishing fires with water arrows. The lockpicking only evolves through tacking on more of the same stages, which only makes the process more tedious.

Because of its inability to meaningfully introduce new threats or novel tools, Legacy of Shadow gets repetitive after only a few levels when the game is through playing its hand of rudimentary tricks. There’s little in the final mission that’s not in the second one and just about every single quest has the same predictable structure. It’s somewhat tolerable in the middle third but grating in the final few stages when it has the audacity to start recycling levels before its rushed and anticlimactic final boss fight.

The levels are not worth repeating, either. Instead of intricate mansions rife with alternate paths and secrets to uncover (and steal), many of Legacy of Shadow’s stages are disappointingly linear or straightforward. Some of its buildings have more than one way in, but they’re not clever and don’t make up for how narrow the game is as a whole. Breaking in is hardly rewarding, and it doesn’t benefit from the rich level design seen in games like Dishonored or Deus Ex where simply getting in is exhilarating. Legacy of Shadow is not an immersive sim like those titles, but it likely would have benefitted from how they treated infiltration. Brilliant stealth games rely on a wealth of options and this game just doesn’t offer many of them.

Thief VR: Legacy of Shadow‘s Guards Are Dummies

Toying around with its doofy guards is also serviceable yet underwhelming. They’ll react to thrown bottles and even a hefty chomp on an apple if they are within earshot, but, in addition to periodically bugging out, they’re often quite dim and not rewarding to outmaneuver. Their scant numbers make it easy to bonk almost every guard on the head without a second thought and the lack of a punishment for getting caught encourages players to not always formulate a plan before bonking. It’s not as satisfying to outsmart hooligans with hollow heads and the lack of pressure deflates the thrill that comes from ghosting through a courtyard unseen or pulling off a big heist.

These idiots also rarely shut up and are constantly repeating their lines as an unsubtle way to always signal to players where they are. This irritating tick is highlighted by the cacophonous sound design that makes it difficult to pinpoint exactly where each guard is. A heavy-footed lackey or mumbling captain a few rooms over may sound like they are just a few feet away, and this disconnect is always disorienting.

All of these sorts of issues point out how Thief VR: Legacy of Shadow cannot escape the mundanity that surrounds it. Carefully crouching around hostiles and pilfering through desks and dressers for valuables is functional yet these systems rarely grow beyond their most elementary forms. This even applies to the bare-bones story that has almost zero character development and is almost exclusively centered around nabbing a handful of MacGuffins before coming to an unceremonious end. Magically resurrecting series veteran Garrett is also hardly utilized for more than cheap morsels of fan service and tiresome quips.

It’s a decent slice of a game with potential glimmering just beneath its surface that deserves to be fleshed out into something more ambitious. Thief was built on innovation, as the original was one of the games that helped popularize the stealth genre. And this VR entry, with its primitive mechanics and level design, doesn’t live up to that storied legacy.

A PS5 copy of Thief VR: Legacy of Shadow was provided by the publisher for the purpose of this review.

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