Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves

It looks like we have come full circle on the Sly Cooper franchise from the breezy fun to the first Sly Cooper game to the horrible disappointment of the second Sly Cooper game.  So that leads us to the third and maybe final game of the whole series, Sly 3: Band of Thieves.  Now what was my reaction to this you wonder?  Was it the thrill of the chase like the first or the somewhat boring Ocean's 11 capers of the second?  Well, the answer in this case lies somewhere in between so let's dive into Sly 3.

It's been some time after the events of Sly 2 where the evil Clockwerk is finally destroyed but things weren't looking up.  Bentley got severely injured and is now confined to a wheelchair, Murray blames himself for this and he has left the group on a quest for peace and the beloved team van is gone.  But some time later, an old associate of Sly's father, McSweeney, comes by and tells Sly of the family vault where all the wealth of the various Coopers are stored on some island where the insane Dr. M has spent years trying to break into.  With this knowledge, Sly is out on his biggest caper he has ever been in but first he's going to need help, a lot of help.

Now there is good news and bad news about the gameplay here.  The bad news is that you still are doing those Ocean's 11 style capers but the good news is that they are entertaining to play this time.  You don't have to worry about finding clue bottles and safes this time around.  I'm sure you'll miss them but that feeling won't last long when you realized how much it sucked finding those things in the second game.  Also, the cast of playable has expanded greatly.  There's a cast of about 7 guys you can play as each guy has there own skill set to use to complete your various capers. 

But I think the biggest improvement from the second game to this game is how much more fun everything is.  Granted, it's still not as fun as the first game but it is close.  The graphics still have that same cartoon-like, breezy atmosphere that the other games had.  The voice-acting finally clicks where everyone gets into the skin of their characters, well except for Carmelita Fox who gets another voice-actress.  The dialogue is fun and there's some great lines in there especially when The Murray is talking especially about flossing his teeth with a bad guy's spine!

However, there's an aspect of this game in where the mere inclusion of it blew my mind.  This game has certain aspects in 3-D!  No, not the graphics or the game itself but the 3-D where you put those glasses on your face and stuff pops out of the screen!  The main problem with putting 3-D in games that has 3-D space is that the camera is constantly moving and there's many focal points for the 3-D to come at the player.  In movies, there's only one and we can handle that.  Thankfully, playing in 3-D is entirely optional and it was even more optional for me when I didn't get the 3-D glasses.  But I did get it used so what did I expect...except it had the original box and manual in it.

So while this game is better than the second, it's not as good as the first one.  The voice-acting is mostly good, the dialogue is fun.  The capers actually make sense and there's almost a tangible effect to what you're doing this time.  The gameplay and graphics still have that breezy quality to them.  The 3-D....it's there and I think it's stupid that it was even attempted but since it's optional, I can't hold it against the game.  Now the question remains after play all three Sly Cooper games, if there was going to be a fourth Sly Cooper game would I want to play it?  The answer is when it's cheap.  They're perfectly fine but not something I'd get right away.

7/10

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