Sly Cooper comes back with more of the same and a few more friends.
Once more a large part of the story deals with Sly's thieving ancestors, this time concerning an attempted break-in of his family's massive vault, containing loot stolen by Coopers past. As always, varied locales are visited, though this time the end goal is typically getting someone new to join the team, each with a new skill set (though one of the characters really only takes on some things Bentley used to do.) Through 6 episodes, and climates as varied as the Australian Outback and high Chinese Mountains, you'll have to guide the team until their attempt to get to the Cooper vault, and prevent its capture.
The sheer variety of things to do is a blessing, with a wide variety of mini-games, including canal chases, RC car tasks, Bentley's hacking, and opera singing (yes, opera singing). Along the way to the tasks are the usual opportunities to gain money through thieving coins and trinkets from guards. The increased number of special moves for Sly, Bentley, and The Murray add to the options, allowing for increased stealth or more oomph to your attacks. The comedy is fantastic, much of it derived from pop culture references, which also contributed to some boss battles, including a bamboo forest fight that wonderfully mimics modern martial art films like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. The addition of a seafaring level, where you travel the high seas, instead of walkways and rooftops, is a clever addition, and the pirate ship battles you have are surprisingly fun (and immensely enriching, once you've mastered them.) The addition of a few levels in optional 3D is an interesting touch that could be expanded on to greater effect in future iterations.
The biggest negative is a nagging holdover from previous Sly games: the circle button, when used to have Sly perform special landings or swinging maneuvers, still doesn't respond the way you need it to, and you'll find yourself on the wrong point (at best), or falling to your death (at worst), far too often. On the other hand, there's near zero penalty for that dying. While it seems nice, you find yourself wondering what the point is of even having health if you barely have to redo anything upon death. The swimming controls (for new addition Dmitri--water still equals death for the others) are clunky, as using the triangle to go forward feels unnatural, and other swimming tasks see you using the 4 action buttons to swim up/down/left/right, while what would be the much more intuitive analog stick sits unused. The same goes for times you control Carmelita, whose camera work stays as the default in her strafe mode, even if you've changed it for normal play. Additionally, there's at least one buggy mission where a person I was supposed to chase was just missing, leaving me to reload. I later noticed he sometimes fell from the perch he was on, and would regenerate in his original position while leaving the duplicate, something the programming likely had trouble reconciling.
The gameplay, with control examples cited above, is a tad on the irritating side, though the fact that everything is the same as previous games makes the learning curve shorter for return players. Both graphics and sound are very high quality, though the Australia level sounds a bit too close to Crash Bandicoot. With only 6 episodes, there's not quite as much meat here as in previous games. The levels do include "master thieving" challenges upon completion, generally falling into the category of 'do something you already did, but faster or with less health.' Truthfully, they offer little real incentive to complete, unless you just have to say you got 100% for each mission. A few 2 player minigames are also available, but nothing that screams of originality. The door to the future is kicked wide open, with the groundwork for the inevitable sequel clearly shown, and even with its occsaional frustrations, after this game you'll probably be wanting that sequel, too.