Sly returns in a familiar but solid game.
Thankfully Sansaru, who brought the Sly collection to us, wanted to pick up where Sucker Punch left off and I must say, they did a good job. The new Sly feels familiar but combined the elements from past games to make a great new adventure that I feel is the best in the series.
Picking up where "Honor Among Thieves" left off. Sly has given up his master thief life, pretending to have amnesia so he can live happily with his cop girlfriend, Carmelita Fox. Bentley is living with his girlfriend Penelope tinkering with machines and Murray is enjoying the demolition derby circuit but soon Sly finds himself itching to return to his old life and soon gets word from Bentley that pages of his family history, The Thievius Raccoonus are disappearing. Turns out a villain named Le Paradox is traveling back through time with his henchmen kidnapping Sly's ancestors and trying to ruin the Cooper family reputation as master thieves. Bentley has made his own time machine and the old team reunites to set things straight. The plot is pretty entertaining for what is essentially Assassin's Creed for kids but has all the charm of a Saturday morning cartoon. Seriously why isn't Sly a TV show? I'd watch the hell out of that. Also missed opportunity for "1.21 Gigawatts into the Flux Capacator" quote. Come on guys.
Sly's 4th outing takes the best aspects of Sly 2 and 3 and combines them. This time around Sly travels to five periods in time in attempt to find his ancestors as well as find the criminal who's gone back in time to try to change history. You enter each stage in a big open world with missions but you can waste a lot of time hunting around for bottles, treasures and masks that unlock all sorts of in game goodies as well as cash to upgrade your characters.
Along with Sly, you once again get to play as Bentley with his various computer hacking mini games, Murray, who's mission mostly boil down to mindless button mashing brawls, Carmelita who has a few third person shooting missions and each time period has a Cooper ancestor to control. With the exception of Bob the Caveman, most of them control like Sly with one extra ability. Rioichi has a shadow dash, Tenessee Kid can shoot a gun, Sir Galeth has a charge jump and Salim Al Kupar can dash up chains quickly. Only Bob feels totally different being a big lumbering caveman who can climb up ice walls.
Sly himself takes a cue from Mario donning special costumes to give him new abilities. Samurai Armor protects him from fire, the jailbird gives him a big heavy ball to attack with, the archer lets him shoot arrows and the Arabian thief was clearly inspired by "Prince of Persia: Sands of Time" allowing Sly to slow down time. Sadly most of these are used a couple times in their respective time periods and aside from opening special treasure doors, you won't be using them as much as you'd hope.
Graphically they kept the colorful, cell shaded look in tact and it's nice to see an HD game do something besides gray and brown realism. Though there were a few times when I was detected by enemies and got chased that slowdown got real bad. I also will say this fourth installment had the best voice acting as well. They found a voice actress for Carmelita that can actually emote and Sly's relatives are a lot of fun.
If I had a complaint, it's that the game is overly easy. You're better off sneaking up on enemies to attack then trying to combat them head on. Boss fights boil down to watching patterns. Checkpoints are often making death more of a quick detour then a penalty and the final boss fight boiled down to nothing more than a series of quick time events. The hardest bits come with the few times the game decided to implement sixaxis controls because Sansaru forgot it's no longer 2006 making Bentley's one hacking game extremely frustrating.
But overall the game is a solid experience. You can spend a lot of time going back to find all the extra goodies and the ending leaves it open for a sequel. It released at a cheap $40 and probably cheaper now so it's worth picking up.