The overall length of the game keeps Sly 1 from being a perfect platformer.
The Sly Cooper series follows a thief raccoon named Sly Cooper who comes from a line of master thieves. A Master thief in this series is classified as one who doesn't steal from ordinary citizens, instead going for the big crime bosses. All of the Cooper family's knowledge is contained in an ancient book known as the Thievius Raccoonus. Before Sly could inherit it when he was a child, his father is murdered by a rival gang of the Coopers, the Fiendish Five, who steal the Raccoonus. This leaves Sly as an orphan, but he soon meets his eventual partners in crime, technical genius Bentley the Turtle and driver Murray the Hippo. The three team up to face the Fiendish Five, from their Chief Engineer Sir Raleigh the Frog to the leader of the group, known as Clockwerk.
The main game goes like this. You travel around each Fiendish Five member's hideout looking for keys to the next part of the hideout, ultimately leading up to the main boss. These keys are hidden throughout the numerous sub levels of each hideout. The main concept of most of the sublevels consists of Sly sneaking through the hideout without getting caught. However, you also get missions where you have to defend Murray by use of a turret as he races for the key. Murray also uses the team van in races for a key. Some of the levels have Sly running from his 'love interest', police officer Carmelita Fox. The final type of level in this game has Sly using a vehicle (like a Submarine) to either collect various items or traverse through a level.
I did notice the main change that Sly 2 and Sly 3 made in the player's health bar. This is my main criticism of the game is that you die mainly by just one hit. One hit and you're dead. Sure, you can get horseshoes to give you extra hit points, but these can be somewhat rare. You have to stock up on them. If you don't, this means that you'll probably have to restart levels a lot of times before you complete them. I know I had to. The race missions and the missions where Sly uses vehicles to move around the level can get kind of hard, especially with that problem I just mentioned.
But, I do admit, the levels where you defend Murray are actually pretty easy. You can clearly see when you have to defend Murray and the game doesn't try to impose any harder difficulty in the game. It's pretty tame. The graphics, even though they are inferior to the later games, are good for their time and I actually like them. The levels are well designed, which I have to say is the best thing about all these games.
Even though Sly 1 has its faults, from a poor health system to being a rather short game, it is a solid platformer. Sucker Punch is a solid game developer for this types of games. We've seen this in games like Sly Cooper and Infamous.