Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus Review
The game's relative ease combined with a very short length prevents Sly Cooper from becoming the next big platformer. But it's great while it lasts.
After a brief hibernation, the platform game is back, and unlike the last time 3D platformers were in vogue, this year's graduating class tends to shy away from the scavenger hunt-style romps that wore the genre thin last time around. Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus has a hook of its own: stealth. While stealth doesn't actually come into play an awful lot, casting the player as a raccoon master thief provides a good backdrop to the action and makes for some interesting level design. Unfortunately, the game's relative ease combined with a very short length prevents Sly Cooper from becoming the next big platformer. But it's great while it lasts.
As the story goes, Sly Cooper is a young master thief, assisted by his turtle buddy, Bentley, and a hippo named Murray. The threesome set out on a mission of vengeance, striking back against the five criminals who killed Sly's father and stole the Thievius Raccoonus, a sort of Stealing for Dummies compiled by the great thieves that make up the Cooper line. Along the way, you'll recover pages from the long-lost book, defeat the Fiendish Five, and run into Carmelita Fox, a cop who's always hot on Sly's tail.
The Fiendish Five have split up and gone their separate ways since stealing Sly's book, so you'll traverse through five separate worlds. With the exception of the final world, each world is broken up into a set of levels. You'll start out each one with a brief introductory level that leads you to a hub level for that world. Each world has seven main objectives that manifest themselves in the form of treasure keys. You'll earn the first key in the intro level. From there, a couple of levels will be available in the hub, but you'll have to earn a couple more keys to open up the rest of the hub. Once you've collected all seven keys, you can fight the world's boss.
Aside from merely getting through the levels, there are also a few extra objectives in the game's standard levels. Each level has a collection of bottles hidden throughout. Once you collect all the bottles, you can open that level's vault and retrieve a page of the Thievius Raccoonus. Each page will give Sly an additional move, such as a forward dash attack, the ability to slow time down while jumping, and a high-speed roll. The moves are a nice touch but are hardly required to finish the game. Each standard level also has a time attack objective that becomes available once you've gotten a level's key and all of its bottles. All that these extras serve to do is pad an already short game out--you'll actually finish the game at a point where it tells you you've found about 60 percent of everything, and each page found or time attack completed adds a point or two to your status thereafter. While most of the game is made up of your standard linear platform-game levels, a few levels are more like minigames. You'll have to do things like sit behind a turret to provide covering fire for Murray as he runs for a key, win races in your van, and perform Smash TV-like shooting moves in a submarine. The minigame levels are creative and serve to break up the action nicely. The game's regular levels are lush and detailed and are almost totally linear. You never really get lost or have trouble figuring out what to do next, because the path ahead is usually clear. That doesn't mean that Sly Cooper is a cakewalk. The most difficult part of the game is that Sly normally dies after taking just one hit. Collecting a lot of coins can bring this number up to two or three hits before Sly gives up the ghost, but it's hardly as easy as, say, having a life bar that is easily replenished by numerous items.
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- GameSpot Scoregood
Player Reviews
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Sly Cooper Is a good, Platformer that doesn't take any bold steps to stand out. But it is still fun for the Genre's fans Continue »
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Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus is a great game and a good start to the seiries. Continue »
Critic Scores
- IGN 8.5 / 10
- Thunderbolt 8 / 10
- Gamer.tv 8.5 / 10
- Eurogamer 8 / 10
- Gaming Age B
- Game Rankings 96 / 100
- TechTV 5 / 5
- GameZone 9.1 / 10
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- SCEA
- Sucker Punch
- 3D Platformer
- Release: Sep 23, 2002 »
- ESRB: Everyone
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