Well that's some text In that spoiler box.
Well, I have never played the previous thief games, and only picked this one up because I loved dishonoured and my personal thoughts on this game is basically a 'down, then up, and haven't played enough yet.'
First off, with no fast travel and the inability of being able to place waypoints, it'll take about 7 hours before you can remember where the main area is to be able to see the queen of beggars and mr. Sidequestapoloza there and I feel it would have been so much better if at least it allowed you to pick up side quests and items from more areas, or at least show markers outside of the area you are currently in would have certainly helped but hey, focus is here! And what a odd idea it was to have that.
You see, I never bothered upgrading the focus skills beyond the efficency upgrades and that was it, and even then that was useless, (speaking of, having only one area where you could get focus points is just stupid, especially when the levels are so dull and drab) because even with no focus in your tank every time you go out of focus mode it'll have a after effect, leaving everything interact able glowing for a couple seconds and it'll happen even without any in your bar! This means that the only thing that I used focus for (looking for loot) was available at all times, and even then without focus on the things shine every couple seconds.
Alright, text splitting time, don't want no wall of text round these parts.
Going on normal even being a casual gamer meant it was a touch easy, the swoop movement means flying about a meter without a problem completely silent, by the way, items that you buy are equally as useless as focus bonuses except for better lock picking, (actually, items you can get, like a wrench and a wirecutter are used occasionally, but being even remotely interested in actually thieving will have enough money for them.) because in all the situations where you might need something here is the full list for a no-kill run survival backpack.
A quiver of blunt arrows and a quiver of rope arrows, mabye a water arrow or two but that's just for when a: there's a dude that has a money pouch that's in light that your OCD just COMMANDS you to get or b: situations where there's a chest already with a couple water arrows right there, a lock pick away, also some food, if you get caught out in the sandbox and get hit a couple times while running away but as long as you don't sell or store the food you get normally, you're golden as far as health goes.
I've haven't got very far (like, 3 main story missions and 4 side quests?)and I don't know if I'll continue playing because the enviroments look nice but it's so dark and everything looks so monotonous I got stuck on a side quest because god knows how I'm going to get into one house, I looked for like 50 minutes and I just couldn't find it, not to mention the eye strain, audio glitches aplenty, required a restart a couple times, and dear god the texture pop-in, the textures on my ps3 take about 20 seconds to load in, load times are okay, but any amount of fast traversing the landscape Means so much loading, so much.
It's not too bad however, despite what I have said, when you get caught in the sandbox, running away organically was fun, if annoying because garret can't run very far without stopping for a breather and like what other people have said its nice to slowly trim away at the quests until that undetected bonus comes up and thieving is good, especially in the more time constrained lock picking parts.
It might get better later, as I said I haven't played very far but stopping that far in just doesn't bode well.
The story can be quantised pretty nicely, mr. Garret and trainee girl are doing a mission together but oh no she kills a bloke with.... Something she calls the claw? It doesn't look like one, and feels like that hook blade addition in assassins creed revelation, but used far less frequently once you... Acquire it, bad things happen (no spoilers) and garret wakes up a year later? With magic eye from the bad thing that happened awakens being pulled along in a body cart to see the new, dangerous and evil watch (a guard, not a grandfather clock.)that's come about from the menace of a disease called the gloom.
Overall It's okay, but I agree with the person above me, 15-20 bucks would have been fine, but I'm not too sure about getting it otherwise.