THIEF: The Bank Heist

My honest reaction after finishing The Bank Heist was to check whether the game had accidentally skipped a loading screen. It had not. What you have here is a single DLC mission for Eidos-Montreal's 2014 Thief reboot, built around infiltrating the Stonemarket First Bank to steal the Hudnall family's necklace, the so-called Star of Auldale, from a vault that is supposed to be the most secure location in the City. The premise is solid. The execution is a pleasant but frustratingly brief exercise in stealth mechanics. On its own terms, the mission is structured around the base game's core toolkit: hugging shadows to stay invisible, silencing footsteps on uneven surfaces, and managing a small arsenal of tools like water arrows to douse light-cameras, a wrench to access trap boxes, and wirecutters to disable floor traps inside the outer vault. The map is split across a courtyard, lobby, lower and upper offices, and two vault layers, with 67 loot items scattered across every desk drawer, locker, and sleeping guard's pocket. If you care about loot completion, expect to replay it with a guide. The guards follow patrol routes that reward patient observation, and tackling it on Master difficulty with no kills, no knockouts, and no alerts is a genuine test of the swoop mechanic and your willingness to memorize camera blind spots. A timed dual-lever vault puzzle near the end caused widespread frustration at launch, largely because the game provides no cues about the correct approach, which is to use the upper ledges rather than the air duct most players instinctively try. The problem is scale. Fans of the original Thief II: The Metal Age bank mission, a sprawling multi-floor landmark in immersive-sim history, will find this comparison the marketing leans on to be actively misleading. The community consensus at launch was pointed: this feels like a mission that was always meant to be part of the main game and was sectioned off as pre-order bait. The level design is polished, the lighting is atmospheric, and getting every coin on a ghost run has genuine replay value, but the whole thing resolves in well under an hour even on a first attempt. There is no narrative payoff, no character writing worth re-reading, and no build-variety consequence since your Garrett comes in with whatever loadout you assembled in the main campaign. Who is this for? Thief (2014) owners who want a focused, replayable stealth sandbox stage and do not mind its compact size. Completionists hunting every loot item will get more out of it than anyone playing casually. Players coming in expecting something that rivals the landmark bank missions of the original series will leave disappointed. As a standalone purchase it is a hard sell given the length. Bundled with the base game or picked up cheaply, it is a well-crafted little puzzle box, just one that the developers clearly knew could have been three times bigger. Monika, Scout Team