Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time

At the end of the day I found myself pleasantly surprised with Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time on the PS Vita. With colourful visuals, a neat little story, and some great voice acting, the game is only hampered by its simplicity, a few minor camera issues, and some long load times. Sure, it doesn’t bring anything radically new to the genre, but it is a good game nonetheless.

Little things like that really add up throughout Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time. The bad pacing in level design, the overwhelming mix of things to do without any sense of how to piece them together into a strong experience, the production values that veer back and forth between fantastic and non-existent it feels like, well, a PlayStation 2 game. Sly's in exactly the same spot he was nearly a decade ago, while other games and franchises have spent that time improving AI and level design. The rest of the industry has moved on, and now so have I.

What’s perhaps most striking about playing a Sly Cooper game late in the PS3 generation is how it proves that the brand itself is still relevant, as is the mascot-based 3D platformer. While similar PlayStation series like Jak & Daxter and Ratchet & Clank have either disappeared entirely or gone in new and strange directions respectively, the fourth Sly Cooper game is true to itself. The decision to remain true to what made Sly great in the first place is daring in an age where the 3D platformer can come off as a dinosaur.