Review: Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus

[Nick]

Not only am I praising another 3-D platformer, I even considered handing out my first A+. How can this be?

<blockquote><i>It's very refreshing to make my way through a title like this and not have thoughts of focus groups interrupt my concentration every other level. Sly Cooper is not a 100% original by any stretch, but there is a major difference between derivative pandering to a market built by someone else and an homage to the greats.</i></blockquote>

<a href=http://www.the-nextlevel.com/reviews/ps2/slycooper/>Read the full details of my 128-bit conversion here.</a>

[sleeve]

Great review, Nick.

I especially liked the bit about how 3D platformers these days all seem like they were hatched out of focus group meetings. I also liked the comparison to Shadowrun on the Genesis, though I'm not sure why it was appropriate.

(I haven't played the game yet)

[xS]

Is it a non stop fetch quest like rares plattformers?

[Nick]

Sleeveboy: Thanks. The Shadowrun flashback came during one brief segment that involves hacking into a computer and busting things up in cyberspace. Sadly, we may never see another Shadowrun game.

A big part of Sly's brilliance is the way in which it combines various elements that we've seen before. If there is, indeed, "nothing new under the sun" (baloney), there should at least be an effort to bring everything together skillfully and creatively. This paint-by-numbers mentality that has gripped many developers can't be good for the industry.

Granted, there have been clones and knockoffs since before Pong, but there have also been developers like Nintendo and Konami bringing originality to the table. Sly is not dripping with innovation by any means, but as I mentioned in the review, it seems to be crafted with a lot of love and attention to detail - two more characteristics of Nintendo and Konami games. I am keeping my eye on Sucker Punch.

xS: I dislike Rare's platformers (sorry, Burg), so I haven't played that many for any appreciable length of time.

Sly Cooper is made up of levels that you can run through in a few minutes. There is coin collecting for extra lives, but you will usually end up collecting coins incidentally - that is, you'll just pick them up as you are doing other things. Many levels have 25-40 bottles, but collecting these is not crucial to completing the game. It's not something like Ocarina of Time where you juggle several collections at once (spiders, jars, etc.) and you spend a good amount of time crawling everywhere, hitting every little thing to find that last item.

Hope that helps.