Review: Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time

Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time is an action-platformer for the PlayStation 3. It was developed Sanzaru Games.

Sly Cooper and his ancestor Rioichi Cooper watching some guards.

The Cooper Gang, led by Sly Cooper, has discovered that the pages of the Thievius Raccoonus, Cooper’s family guide to thieving, have started going blank. Bentley, the brains of the outfit, learns that someone is messing with the timestream and Cooper’s ancestors, causing the blank pages. Luckily Bentley has built his own time machine with the help of his girlfriend, who disappeared shortly before. Sly, Bentley, Murray (the muscle), and later Sly’s most persistent foe Inspector Carmelita Fox, have to go back in time, rescue Sly’s ancestors, and find out who is behind this.

Thieves in Time is five levels long, taking place at a different point in the past. The Cooper Gang start out in a hub level, and Sly, Bentley, Murray, or one of Sly’s ancestors go to a point on the map to start a mission. Some of the missions take place in the hub level as well, but most are in their own little sub levels. Eventually the gang forms a plan to stop whoever is trying to screw over Sly’s ancestor in that era and apprehend them, leading to a boss fight.

The first boss fight.

The missions are a combination of platforming and stealth, though the stealth is mostly making sure you stay out the bad guy’s line of sight, which is easy since the gang is so acrobatic. Sly can climb buildings and run along ropes, as well as pickpocket goon’s pockets for extra cash to buy new skills for the gang. Bentley cannot climb but his wheelchair can hover; most of his levels take advantage of his sticky bombs and his computer hacking abilities. Murray can only jump and attack, but is strong enough to actually fight enemies directly. Sly’s ancestors play almost like Sly, but have a special skill that gives them access to parts of a level Sly cannot reach.

Murray in his tricked out wheelchair in the Old West.

Stealth sections rarely come up in regular missions but are a semi-important part of travelling around the hub. In the hub levels enemies are a lot more numerous and follow set routines, necessitating more caution when sneaking around them as Sly or Bentley, who are quite weak. The guards are still not much of a problem though, because Sly and his ancestors can just run across the ropes hanging above all of them, and you do not use Bentley often.

The platforming sections are not difficult and have a lot of variety to them. Sanzaru uses all the Cooper gang’s abilities and the different eras to make sure the platforming bits never get repetitive. There are also minigames that are unique to some of the missions, further adding to the diversity. They are not “I have to go back and play these levels again and again” levels, because they are still only platform levels, and not particularly original or creative ones, but they work. I also would have liked it if the game either had Sly and his ancestors handle all the levels or found ways to use Bentley, Murray, and Inspector Fox more, because they are wasted, with only the occasional computer the for Bentley to hack, and a token level for Murray in each chapter that Sly could have handled; and Fox having less than five levels in total.

One of the minigames Sly participates in.

Parts of the level you can climb are marked by blue sparkles. You can only grab onto them by pressing the circle button. This can be a problem if there are multiple blue sparkle areas, because the game might make Sly grab onto the sparkle area you do not want him to when you press the button.  I would have liked it more if Sly just grabbed the nearest blue sparkle automatically.

The only other thing to do in the hub is collecting thirty bottles hidden around the level and hunt down treasures also hidden in the level. Finding the thirty bottles unlock a safe with some hidden gear that helps Sly, and the treasure can be sold to buy new skills for the gang. These side quests use the entirety of hub levels more effectively that the main missions, but it can be a pain to look everywhere to find these small objects with only minor audio clues for help. The vast majority of skills you can buy are unnecessary, which makes hunting down everything seem even more pointless. Collecting these bottles and treasures is best handled on the way to other missions, if you feel like doing them at all.

The story is a good, solid time travel story. Everything lines up with no paradoxes, and the plot is narrated by the cast instead of a boring omniscient narrator. Characters and humor though are painful to listen to, the jokes are not funny and most of the cast are crass ethnic clichés. Also, while the overall plot makes sense, the individual level plots, where the gang figure out how to accomplish the vaguely defined goal of defeating the evil time traveler of the era, always have a bunch of parts that do not appear to move toward that goal and just look like they are wasting time. And like the with the number of levels, Murray and Fox get shafted storywise.

The gang and Sir Galleth Cooper, chilling in the hideout between missions.

Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time is a decent action-platformer. Its only real problem is the story, which is not invasive enough to ruin the gameplay.