Likewise, if you’re picking up smaller items, you need to have your onscreen cursor focused on it exactly, or else you won’t even register it. You have to hit it at just the right angle, or else you get stuck. Getting through doorframes and other openings can be a constant struggle, particularly if you happen to be holding a larger object. Like I said, it’s realistic, but it’s still a drag.Īs bad as the intentional decisions are, though, the unintentional ones are much worse. And if you want to steal any larger items, be prepared for it to be an ordeal: you won’t be able to open doors or anything, so it’ll be a constant cycle of walking, putting it down, opening the door, and then picking it back up and continuing on. Even if that’s what you do in real life, it feels a lot more cumbersome than it should. Basic lockpicking, for example, is a pain, with lockpicks being incredibly fragile and there being nothing in the way of tactile feedback to tell you when you’re on the right track.Getting into your car is even worse, an onerous three-step process: first you have to choose to open the door, then you have to choose to sit down, then you have to choose to start the car. In terms of the latter, there are all kinds of strange and annoying design decisions. This feeling, however, may be more because the game’s controls and performance are terrible. It all starts out kind of exciting, but after awhile, it feels more like a chore than anything else. The jobs blend into each other quickly, with little to differentiate them. The cops and civilians are pretty stupid, with AI that forgets you exist if you just duck into a closet, and fields of vision that make zero sense (case in point: the time I was able to hide from someone simply by crouching in front of them, even though I was holding a giant painting at the time). While that probably sounds exciting on the surface, it makes for shallow, repetitive gameplay. In the neighbourhoods, you’re sometimes assigned targets, but just as often, you’re left to our own devices to steal as much as you can while avoiding suspicion and the police. You pawn your stolen wares at the pawn shop. At your home base, you sleep, pick up jobs, buy new tools, get tips on possible targets, and learn new skills. You spend the game going between your home, a couple of neighbourhoods, and a pawn shop. I’ve simplified things a little, but this game is already pretty simple. There are no banks or casino heists here: this is all about small-scale break and enter, picking locks and climbing trellises to get into houses and then getting what you can, with a bit of vandalism along the way to mix things up. After all, where many of them put you in the shoes of farmers, or bus drivers, or mechanics, Thief Simulator - as the title implies - promises to give you a taste of life on the other side of the law.īut, no, it turns out that just like most other job simulators, Thief Simulator seems to exist to show you about how the job is defined by constant repetition.

Thief Simulator feels like it should be different than most job simulators. Developer: Forever Entertainment / Noble Muffins

Thief simulator xbox one