Sly Cooper 2: Band of Thieves reviewed

So there was this game called Sly Cooper and the Thievius Racoonus which was alright.  It looked great and it was a cute diversion but it was a bit too short for it to be memorable.  But I knew if I stuck with it, maybe the series would actually make a great game so it was with great pleasure and great excitement when I started to play Sly Cooper 2: Band of Thieves.  However, when I finished the game it was with great disappointment and slight anger that I found out that this game wasn't as good as the first one.  But I'll get to the why's in a moment.

It's been a couple years after the events of the first game where Sly Cooper and the rest of the gang, Bently the brains and Murray the Brawn, broke the evil, robotic and immortal Clockwerk, whose hatred of the Cooper family kept him alive for several thousand years, into tiny pieces.  But Clockwerk wasn't quite gone since the pieces were alive and kept in a Cairo museum where they could conceivably be put back together.  So the gang goes to Cairo to steal them back but somebody else beat the gang to it.  In fact, it was The Klaww Gang that did it so the gang has to find the pieces and kick The Klaww Gang's butt.  Oh and that Carmenlita Fox is back along with seemingly more competent cop Captain Neyla.

So the first game had your setup being this huge hub with a lot of missions to do in various doorways.  In this, the hub and missions are a lot more connected which is fine in theory.  In practice however there is a lot of backtracking back and forth to the mission and safehouse.  Now why do you need to go to your safehouse?  Because you have to switch between playing as Bentley and Murray who also does a lot more stuff.  And then you realize that you're playing Ocean's 11 the game!  Which you might think is awesome but it somewhat becomes boring as you have to go back and forth between characters to do some schemes that will get you to the Clockwerk part of the level.  And they all have the same pattern, first you have to do some recon then you had to do three or four missions as all three guys and then you do the big caper for 8 levels!

But there is some good things in this game that elevates it to bore up to kinda painless diversion.  Like the first game, the look of Sly Cooper 2 is still eye-catching it with the cel-shaded graphics and animated cutscenes.  But this time, this game tends to go out of focus a whole lot, especially if you get detected by enemies.  The voice acting for the most part is pretty good.  Sly is still the lovable smart-ass, Bentley still freaks out and uses complex smarty-pants techno-babble in a most awesome way and Murray as evolved into "The Murray" where he beats people up while saying awesomely cheesy one-liners.  Carmenlita....doesn't fare to well since her voice changed from feisty Latina to boring American but she doesn't appear too much. 

This game is a disappointment to the breezy fun of the first Sly Cooper.  The gameplay and mission structures have good ideas but they aren't executed to the best of its abilities.  It does still look great in a nice comic book-esque story and the voice acting still gets the breezy job done.  If the first game was a nice time-waster, this game is more of a useless time-waster that won't make you suffer but you really do wish you were playing the first one again.

6/10