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