Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus

The Good
Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus is a wonderful entry into the platform genre. When you first put in the disc, it brings to a screen impressing you with a nice view of a cartoon Paris, showing off an impressive draw distance and a unique art style. I know some people are sick of cel-shading but I, for one, am not. It helps that this is an original work and not just aping the style of a popular cartoon. Lines are thick and bold and things like lighting are handled beautifully.

For the intro and the first level, it seems like a well made, though fairly standard 3D platform game: You collect stuff by navigating your way through a 3D obstacle course with some jumping over pits of instant death and smack an occasional enemy. The stuff you collect gives you access to new areas, where you repeat until you get enough stuff to fight the boss.

The second world is where things really open up. You're given new moves and it becomes obvious this is far more than a Mario 64 clone. The new moves themselves aren't such a big deal and they mostly just allow Sly to jump on new things, like the tops of poles or rails. It keeps the game fresh, but isn't a lot we haven't seen in dozens of platformers.

What makes it fresh is everything that is added to the basic run jump mix. It owes debts to such disparate games as Parappa the Rapper, Metal Gear Solid, Space Harrier, Mario Kart, Robotron and various rail shooters.

The stealth elements are the most obvious of this. There are various security systems involving lasers or spotlights Sly has to avoid tripping or he'll sound and alarm as well as enemies who are carrying lights who can similarly spot you and blow a whistle, bringing other enemies running. This isn't primarily a stealth game and it's meant to be accessible to kids, so it's nothing on the level of Splinter Cell, but it certainly spices things up.

The boss fights are amazing. All of them have a different theme to defeat them goes way beyond the standard dodging and hitting with only attack patterns changing. The musical number at the end of the swamp is of particular note. Be warned it's a rather catchy bit which could distract you the rest of the day.

Without really breaking genre, it also introduces a bunch of variety with various chase levels. Some involve the cop that is chasing you, Carmelita Fox, taking shots with a bazooka, but there are others, like a swamp monster that destroys the entire level, leaving you to stay one step ahead lest you the ground fall out from underneath you or a level on a sinking platform where you have to keep moving to avoid drowning.

The Bad
There are some odd glitches, like Sly sometimes falls off an edge and spins in space forever instead of falling. This isn't a huge problem as pausing and unpausing usually fixes it and you can restart the level from the menu, but it's annoying.

The characters use relative few polygons. The art style mostly does a good job of hiding this, but there are some close-ups where you can just count the triangles.

All the regular platform levels have a bunch of bottles to collect. If you find them all, you can unlock a safe which has a page from the Thievius Raccoonus, giving you a new ability. This sounds good in theory, but in practice, most of the abilities are quite useless. One that comes to mind is one you get in the fourth world which keeps you from dying if you fall into a bottomless pit. This is obtained right at the end of the game. The fifth world is all shooter and has no sections where you have any danger of falling into a pit and it's useless for time trials because the limits are too tight to recover from such a thing. I found myself thinking it would have been handy several worlds earlier.

The difficult ramp is uneven. The main game is pretty short and easy. It took me about ten hours and I was going through the levels multiple times to find all the bottles. I'm betting a first time player who was just aiming to finish could do it in six or seven hours. It was a rare level that took me more than a couple tries and those were mostly of the learn-by-dying variety. There's little that isn't quite simple once you know what to do. Finding the bottles was also fairly trivial, especially after I found the one in each level that gave the positions for every bottle in the world.

The racing segments are somewhat more difficult. This is largely a design issue with the rubber-band AI. They seem to be set to always perform a little better than you, so the only viable strategy is to save up your turbos, hang in second on third place and trying to pull ahead in the final lap. Unfortunately, this is really the only difficulty of race levels. Typical racing strategies like proper cornering and good lines barely come into play if at all. I suspect this was to make the game more accessible to those that didn't play racing games, but it was dumbed down a bit too much.

After you have beaten the main game and have all the bottles, you can do time trials to unlock developer commentary. Suddenly, the difficulty goes from laughably trivial to controller-throwingly difficult as the time trial goals are all about a second more than the best theoretically possible. You have to do everything, including hitting the marker to start the run at the correct angle, perfectly. This wouldn't be so bad if you had somehow been prepared for it, but this doesn't occur.

My main complaint with the game is the plot and characters. Like the gameplay itself, the characters are a bunch of shallow versions of popular clichés. This works for the game because of the sheer variety, but the characters more grated. You have the criminal with the heart of gold avenging his family who was killed by actual bad criminals that's been seen in countless kung fu movies and similar western genres, the cop-criminal sexual tension, the impossibly nerdy sidekick, the fat guy whose obsession with food overrides all sense, etc. I liked the villains. They were cool, but the characters who are the core of the franchise who are supposed to be the ones convincing me to buy the sequel were more of an annoyance than anything.

The Bottom Line
Like many modern platformers, Sly Cooper is really a bunch of genres thrown together in a platformy wrapper but avoids becoming overly complicated by stripping all the genres down to their essentials. This means the game itself is quite a bit simpler than it ideally would be, but it's still tons of fun, so this is forgivable. While it starts off a bit standard, the quality ramps up shortly, so keep at it a couple hours. The story isn't great, but it's thankfully this is not a story-heavy game. This is a fun diversion for adult gamers, but the cartoony graphics, low difficulty and simple play and characters also make it a great choice for children.