Guild of Thieves

Copyright : Rainbird | Reviewed by : Ritchardo

WHY BUY THIS GAME WHEN YOU CAN STEAL IT?

Except you can?t. Not yet. An amateur like you? Come off it! Now, if you were a fully paid-up member of the notorious Guild of Thieves, things would be different...

Return once more to the world of Kerovnia and attempt to obtain access to the most exclusive of clubs - The Guild of Thieves

Graphics

A hallmark of the Magnetic Scrolls games are the quality of the accompanying graphics and Guild of Thieves is no different.

From the digitised black and white loading screen onwards, the visuals of this game ooze sheer class. Each of the depictions of your surroundings are steeped in character and stand-up well to the Amiga version?s visuals. The text is well presented and easy to read without straining the eyes.

The only problem I found with the pictures is the way that they scroll down over the text when you enter a screen and although there is a pause long enough for most to read the location description, it can be a pain waiting for the picture to go back. This is perhaps churlish when you consider the text is presented in Mode 1 while the graphics are drawn in Mode 0 so the fact that they are presented on screen at the same time in an almost seamless fashion should be commended.

Sound

None.

Gameplay

Improving over its already impressive predecessor, The Pawn, in almost every single way, Guild of Thieves boasts a fantastic storyline that although a simpler and more traditional tale of collecting treasure, opens up all sorts of different possibilities through the way it is set-up.

The aim of the game is to obtain membership of the Guild of Thieves and to do this you must complete a series of tasks designed to test your abilities - this takes the form of finding and stealing items of value and transporting them to one of the night safes and thereby increasing your score. This task based gameplay means that the game is not linear in its design and you can go off and play in pretty much any direction you want so that you?re unlikely to come against a brick hard puzzle and switch off, you can, after all, wander away to a different area of the game world and try something else.

Like all Magnetic Scrolls games, Guild of Thieves boasts an impressive parser with a user-friendly interface that belies the complexity and intelligence of the game?s engine. Communicating with non-player characters is fully possible although the range of responses is probably a bit lower than those found in The Pawn.

The only real fault I could find with the game is the fact that you can completely screw up a game by banking an item that you later need to solve a puzzle, this is more an inconvenience than anything else though because by regular saving and keeping an eye on your score you can tell if you?ve banked something you shouldn?t have (your score goes up every time you bank an item of value).

A neat mixture of tough puzzles and a wide open game world that it feels as if is a real, breathing world to explore, The Guild of Thieves would make an excellent 3D remake project for someone.

One of my very favourite text adventures of all time, Guild of Thieves has passed the test of time well and is well worth the investment of time it will take to complete.