[Timgt5]

Sly Cooper Thieves in Time
Review By Timgt5

Platformers are among the longest running of all types of videogames. Ever since the days of Donkey Kong, Pacman, and Burger Time, these games have held a special place in gaming history. Sega and Nintendo advanced the art considerably with Mario Brothers and Sonic the Hedgehog in the early nineties. It was Sony however with games like Spyro the Dragon that essentially built the modern template for the 3D open ended platforming experience. During generation six, Sony launched what is widely referred to as the “Big Three” of Platformers, Ratchet and Clank, Jak and Daxter and Sly Cooper. Each had their own flavor with Sly Cooper adhering more to tradition than the others. All three series were highly successful competitors to Nintendo’s Mario series.

Sly Cooper’s developer, Suckerpunch relinquished the series after “Honor Among Thieves” the last in its trilogy, and moved on to work on the triple A action series Infamous. Sony brought in another smaller developer called Sanzaru games to handle the conversion to HD so the original trilogy could be sold over the Playstation Network. After completing the conversion, Sanzaru approached Sony about developing a new game in the series using PS3 assets and showed Sony some ideas. Sony, suitably impressed gave Sanzaru the green light and Sly Cooper, Thieves in Time was born as a budget title. So did Sanzaru do justice to this great classic?

Read on…

Sly Cooper Thieves in Time
Type Platformer-Action
Platforms: PS3/PS VITA (handheld)
Developer Sanzaru
Publisher SCEA
Release Date February 2013
Rating E (Everyone)

Highs: Original Game’s visual style perfectly redone, fluid mechanics, solid narrative, diverse gameplay, voice actors from the original series, great soundtrack

Lows: Occasionally sluggish controls, short length, long load times

Background: The Sly Cooper series takes place in an alternate world dominated by anthropermorhic animals who assume normally human roles. The series centers around four main characters:

Sly Cooper: Sly is a raccoon and descends from a long line of master racoon thieves. Over time each Cooper has recorded his or her best thieving techniques in a manual that became known as the Thevious Racoonous, a book sacred to Sly. Sly is the last of his line (at this point) as a child an evil villain named Clockwerk had his parents killed. With no other family, Sly was placed in an orphanage where he makes two special friends, Bentley and Murray. Think George Clooney’s interpretation of Danny Ocean, albeit with a built in mask and bushy tale.

Bentley is a nerdish turtle with penchant for hacking, code breaking and invention. Bentley is a wiz with computers and electronics-After the second game in the series he became a paraplegic, but that did not stop him. He rolls around in a wheel chair packed to the brim with all sorts of high tech weapons and gadgets. Bentley is sort of Sheldon Cooper with a shell.

Murray is a big powerful hippo, he possesses both enormous strength and a big heart.

After the three of them leave the orphanage they form a gang and begin to pull daring heists around the world. As they considered ordinary folks to be no real challenge they specialized in taking from criminals often returning valuable artifacts to their rightful owners, pocketing whatever other loot they could find along the way.

Carmelita Fox, Carmelita is a lovely fox with a fiery temper and a penchant for justice. An Interpol detective, Carmelita becomes obsessed with catching Sly who she views as a common criminal. Sly becomes enamored with Carmelita and treats her pursuit of him playfully, often setting her up to catch various super-villains while staying a step just out of her grasp. Despite her outward animosity towards Sly, she secretly harbors feelings for him.

Plot: Sly Cooper Thieves in Time takes place a short time after Honor Among Thieves. The gang has disbanded and Sly is faking amnesia in order to pursue a romance with Carmelita. Bentley who is now working with Penelope ( a mouse and fellow tech geek) on time travel is befuddled by pages mysteriously disappearing from the Thevious Racoonous.

Penelope also vanishes and Bentley reassembles the gang to find out what is going on. Carmelita discovers Sly’s ruse and becomes angry with him and takes up her pursuit once more. Sly, Bentley and Murray head back through time to stop an evil skunk named La Paradox, who is attempting to erase the Coopers from history. Along the way they ally and work with a number of Sly’s ancestors to thwart Paradox’s plans and repair the damaged timeline.

The narrative is snappy, lighthearted and well written. The story has a couple of well placed twists and a secret ending (you did unlock all those trophies, right?) The writers also did a good job with the love/hate relationship between Sly and Carmelita, overall not deep but pleasant and easy to follow.

Gameplay: The game retains much of the mechanics of the original series. The game is divided into different periods of time which serve as its levels. Sly and his friends must carry out a series of missions styled like Ocean’s Eleven. These are mostly carried out by Sly or one of the ancestors once they are rescued and then recruited by Sly’s gang. Some missions are carried out by Bentley or Murray. Overall this lends a lot of variety to the game play as each has various talents that can be used to accomplish a particular task.

The missions themselves break down into smaller tasks which include information gathering, theft of a needed costume or document, scavanging for parts, hacking and disabling the security systems, and occasionally brawling. This leads to a lot of diversity of game play. Bentley occasionally brings out a drone that you can control as well. As Sly visits different eras he acquires special costumes which have attributes needed to carry out task for that time period. Sly’s ancestors also have unique abilities which allow them to traverse otherwise inaccessible areas. The hacking sequences mimic late 1980s style arcade games and are a lot of challenge and fun to complete (some utilize the often neglected motion control feature of the gamepad). In between missions the team can go on “theifnet” and purchase upgrades and new abilities, Sly’s Paraglider being critical early on.

The games actual mechanics are smooth for the most part, and closely replicate those of the original series. Most of the Cooper characters are not fighters and cannot take a lot of damage, so navigating the levels requires discretion and good planning to get around enemy henchpersons. Sly and his ancestors can sneak up behind enemies and pick their pockets for coins or other loot. They can also utilize their canes to do stealth knockouts. Murray on the other hand is much more a brawler and is primarily used when muscle is needed over stealth. In addtion the characters sometimes have to engage in QTE sequences which can be challenging and fun.

In general everything works well, but occasionally some of the control responses are a bit slow resulting in an unnecessary mission failure. This problem though is more of a minor annoyance than an actual game-breaker. Also the in-game loading times are a bit long.

Sights and Sounds: One element of the Sly Cooper series that always stood out was its art style. Eschewing the normal Pixar style CGI, Sly Cooper’s visuals are “Cell Shaded” (Cell shading is a process than makes a game look more like a moving comic book or cartoon). The folks at Sanzaru faithfully recreated the Cell shaded visuals of the original series and thanks to the PS3’s superior (vs PS2) processing power they were able to factor in a lot more detail. The basic appearances of the major characters remain the same as in the original games. The environments are diverse, colorful and fun to explore.

In terms of sound design Sanzaru chose to retain a lot of the background sounds and sound effects from the original games including the famous violin plucking effect when one of the characters is sneaking up on an enemy. Sanzaru also managed to reassemble the voice cast from the original games to reprise their roles (nice touch) the games soundtrack is right on the money with music fitting for each location and time period.

Kids Corner: Sly Cooper Thieves in Time is rated E (everyone) is more or less a cartoon (Think Ocean’s Eleven if it were produced by Nickelodeon). The game can be safely enjoyed by children with no real issues. Violence such that it is of the Saturday morning cartoon variety and is more comic than anything else. The game sports no harmful language and there are no issues with sex or nudity.

In Summary: I commend the effort made here by Sanzaru to keep this great franchise going. We need games like this in our library. Also Sony is to be commended for backing this project. Sly Cooper Thieves in time is a delightful homage to a classic platfomer and an excellent continuation of the series. The retail price is 19 bucks so it’s very affordable.

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