Without a walkthrough, this mission is frustrating and, in some ways, broken. My best example is on the loot; I only lacked the loot objective, and when going back through, I suspected there might be something related to the pool table. My problem was that one of the white balls was knocked off the table. This is not my fault, as I was explor...
There is a high quality in some of the design and thought processes, but I have no patience to play an all black (and I mean completely black in some places, full screen). Not just a big corner or dodgy hall, but entire sections are 0 ambient light, find your way through with no bearings or identifiers of any kind... but the guards with swords ...
This one is in daylight, which is rare, so you can check it out if you need help with that. But otherwise, it showcases most of the problems of early FMs:
no objectives (not even a clear understanding of what "temple" and "domus" mean when you are trying to launch the mission)
No loot, all light_bright, no enemies, all tile, very pixelate...
I only have 2 problems with this mission. First, item placement. Scrolls are upside down, and beds and lights are sunk into the floors (yes, even lights). The second issue is an in-game note that lets us know this is the author's mission. That is what the readme is for, not to yank us out of the ambiance you have created as an author.
Ot...
The city parts are fairly good. Lots of squares and single textures, but you can see some thought and effort. That is what I like about Thief: when it works, it works, and we don't need to sweat the details.
But once you hit the sewers, the darkness, single texture usage, and maze-like atmosphere become a gotcha-style key and path hunt. E...
I was ready to deem this an 8 or 9 most of the way through the mission, but now I fear a 7 is too generous. This is a nice-looking, well-designed, very large level that just keeps going. I was really impressed by the rooftop section, the number of guards, the hidden loot, and even parts of the story. There were quite a few, 'oh, neat!' momen...
The first thing I noticed for this mission was the difficulty options: Easy / Expert / Hard (do I choose the middle difficulty or the far right one?) If you didn't notice, expert is usually on the far right and indicates the most difficult option. So did this author inadvertently switch them, or are they calling "hard" the most difficult?
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This author provided more details and ambiance than most demo makers. It's close to a small mission, but the objectives don't give direction, and I couldn't find a way to "complete" them.
The cart at the beginning is quite fun, and there are some neat ideas throughout, but in the end, this is just a resource.
This only suffered from a few minor issues, like guards getting stuck on patrol and short/fast patrol routes when you don't have a blackjack or lockpick.
This is well designed, looks good, is thought out, and is fun to play. My biggest issues are that you don't know why your blackjack and lockpick are somewhere else and spread out in the t...
I was going to be very harsh on this until I realized it's a demo. For that, I would still say it's not very useful as is, even though a couple of interesting things were attempted. First, we have the map of the city as the loading screen. That doesn't make any sense. You are given no objectives, and the objective screens were edited to be v...
Yes, I would recommend this mission, but with a walkthrough handy. If I can post links in a review, here is one:
http://www.users.freenetname.co.uk/~gonchong/
(You will have to click "level design" and then the link for Thief:Dark Project and Thief 2, and then the Shunned mission and then the walkthrough link, since the web page all ope...
While this looks more appealing than several demo missions, it doesn't seem to offer much in terms of what an author would need help with in building a mission (or for a fan in wanting to play one). The point is to throw hammers at things, but it's not even very solid in that implementation. The hammers don't appear to actually hurt the creatu...
I get that this might appeal to a portion of the player base, but when you take the blackjack away on an all-human mission and then say, 'no kills, ' it stops being Thief for me. But that only begins the long list of problems I have with this mission.
The first impression I received was from 2 blank objective boxes on the loadout for both ...
This was a decent level with some minor issues.
There is a typo in the main mission description, some textures don't align well, a spotlight is pointing in the wrong direction, and I got stuck a few times as the "secrets" weren't sized well (I use quotes because there are no secrets). All of the "secrets" are intended as part of normal pla...
An interesting concept that works in some places and fails in others. The black and white setting helps to set the mood and ambiance, but where it fails, it fails a bit too much. For one, with most things in a grey scale, it can be difficult to detect where the shadows are. The other issues are engine quirks that cause full bodies of water to...
With a few small issues, this is a great mission. I found some sound brush issues, and some areas are bland, although well crafted from a structural and design perspective.
The big drawback is that the puzzles aren't always sensible. And since the mission is on a larger scale, backtracking to find things that still don't make sense is ted...
While this mission has some flaws, they aren't center stage. What is center stage is a great use of brush work to make some creative ambiance and a well-designed mission.
The cons list would be that it's very short and easy. There is a fair amount to explore, but you can do it very quickly, as all the guards were mostly facing away from m...
I need to get better at noting demo missions before I play them. I kept thinking the whole time (all 5 minutes I played it) that this should be classified as a demo mission... and it was!
It has a working smelter.
An NPC carrying a lantern and shovel.
A teleport book.
The ability to dig up a plant? Not sure - not working with Tfix/Newd...