All right I have
completed Thief II so I might as well dump my thoughts here.
Life of the Party is overrated. The only appeal I found was the novelty in running on rooftops and breaking into random homes. As a level, it felt too linear and the building at the end with the five floors of sameyness was boring. My favorite levels were Framed and Ambush. I particularly liked how the former made ghosting it one of its goals instead of being a self-imposed challenge.
The women on the team let me down this time. Terri Brosius's Trace the Courier was particularly disappointing in its lengthy linearity.
I'm sure hundreds of people before me have noted that having to play the same level twice in a row is ridiculous and stupid. I wonder if it was added mid-way through to make the game longer or if the levels they intended to add in Thief II Gold were originally there and had to be cut for time/quality issues. At least the stuff I looked up about the rerelease showed that LGS was just as disappointed in how it turned out.
Randy Smith's levels weren't as awful as his output in Thief. In fact none of the levels felt as bad as Haunted Cathedral/Return to Haunted Cathedral/Escape though Smith couldn't resist putting in a bunch of tedious errand-running bullshit into the the last level.
Whoever directed Stephen Russell's Karras voice botched it. A damn shame because his slightly-different robot voice sounds good.
I appreciated the increased
gender inclusivity. Female guards were no doubt added because of feminist criticism.
Overall I'd say both games are thoroughly mediocre and I don't prefer one over the other; though at least 2 doesn't have Smith's trinity of shame. It appears to me that they get the attention they do because of art direction, the novelty of being something different (which mostly wore off with the first sequel), and of course nostalgia. There's just not much potential for discernible gameplay variety here. It's pretty telling how the sequel couldn't trounce its predecessor despite various gameplay improvements and additions. And then the third one became some console-limited mediocrity I'm not even going to bother with. When it comes to stealth games, stealth action is the way to go. I have no desire to revisit these games again, but I've played Deus Ex, Hitman: Blood Money, and Tenchu: Wrath of Heaven multiple times. Square Enix made the right call when they shifted their Thief into the stealth action genre, however they made a big mistake when they decided to make it a sequel; they should have gone with Not-Dishonored.