Since it's my job to analyze and pick apart games, as well as to simply enjoy them, I had to try with all my might to separate my strong, immediate like of Sly Cooper the character from my like of Sly Cooper the game. The point being two-fold, really. Sly Cooper is an enormously charming platform character that I have liked from the first time I saw him. It's important to like a platform character; in fact, it's quite significant. You will spend an enormous amount of time with him or her while playing the game, and if you think he or she is cheesy, stupid, unoriginal or whatever, it will color your feeling for the rest of the game. Sly is cool in many ways: He's stealthy, talented and always up for dangerous missions. There is an unspoken cool about his character that's hard not to like. See? I like Sly a lot. For the most part, I like playing the game too, though it's not without some eye-raising issues. A third-person perspective 3D platformer, Sly Cooper delivers a single-player jump-and-smack experience that skillfully blends old-school timing elements with skill-based techniques in a multiplicity of ways. First, Sly Cooper the character not only looks good when he's moving -- thanks to superb animation and the greatest tail ever -- but he also controls well. Sly is incredibly responsive, and though his size seems a little large at times due to his long arms and legs and the cane he carries, skillfully jumping and hitting enemies with precision is a quick study. Having gone back to play Super Mario 64 over the last few weeks, Sly Cooper in comparison is a much less complicated character to control. His list of basic moves is straightforward, including attacks, jumps, double jumps, walking, running and climbing. Sly learns more basic moves in the first world. There he learns stealth moves when the area is lit with a blue mystical wave; like MGS's Solid Snake, the stealth move is wall sneak. Sly can also use his cane to swing from hanging rings, which shows off Sucker Punch's excellent physics model, and he can climb ladders and poles, using the Circle button. After beating missions Sly learns special moves, usable by toggling through with the L2 button and selecting Triangle. Slow motion, fast motion, dive attack, hat mine, decoy image and more are earned. Sadly, few of these are required to complete the game, which makes one wonder if it's really needed to open them up in the first place. By beating bosses, however, players earn very necessary moves. These include the Ninja Spire Jump, the Rail Walk and Rail Slide, an Invisibility Technique and technically superior ways to use guns, like for instance modifying the team van with a powerful turret. Using these latter moves adds a great deal of depth and enjoyment to the game. What I like most about Sly Cooper's level design is that collecting is part of the bigger picture, but it's not the only reason to be there. The worlds are rife with mini-games (about one to two per world) and the platform areas feature a masterful blend of jumping, fighting and stealth areas. I loved Back Alley Heist since it enables players to use awnings to bounce along fire escapes and sneak past searchlights. On the other hand, there's The Lair of the Beast, a swamp filled with slides, rails, and a massive serpent that comes chasing after you near the end. Fire in the Sky is a beautiful Chinese-designed level filled with pagodas and high mountain passes that are just plain pretty. And the last world, The Cold Heart of Hate, is surely my favorite because its packs in everything. It's riddled with tough stealthy areas, shooting levels, run-and-chase sectors, and lead-and-snipe missions. Plus, it's the hardest level of the five. For the record, there are five bosses, one for each world, and they start off easy. There's Raleigh the frog, Muggshot the burly, mustachioed gambler-gangster, Mz. Ruby the alligator-voodoo queen, The Panda King, a demolition/fireworks artist gone bad, and Clockwerk, the brilliant, giant robotic hawk that lives on a health diet of hate and jealousy. Mz. Ruby provides an excellent ToeJam and Earl/Parappa the Rapper fight that's most enjoyable. She and the Panda King present moderately hard fights, but the last boss is definitely going to require some time, since it's a three-part fight. Just a note: For those who like collecting, it's there for you. While the world is lush looking, more importantly, it's bustling with animated enemies and treasure troves of breakable objects. As you go about beating the level, swinging at seemingly unimportant objects more often than not provides players with coins. Collect 100 coins and earn another life. Bottles can be collected to open up safes, each one providing special moves and/or vital Cooper history. And horseshoes give you an extra life.Comprising five large worlds, each containing seven levels, Sly Cooper appears to be a large, long game. But it's a little deceptive. While many of the gameplay techniques are derived from Mario-style gameplay, the game design in part follows a more Crash Bandicoot style. Meaning that unlike Super Mario 64, which practically required players to attain every last star to see the ending, Sly Cooper is designed more like Crash Bandicoot, so players can beat the game, see the ending, and can then, if they like, return to the game to collect the rest. I beat the game in less than 12 hours this way, missing about four bottles, and I played through numerous levels two or three times in that period. For the record, once beaten, the game offers very tough Time Challenges, which potentially add numerous hours. But in my mind Sly Cooper is a short game. Compared to any Mario game, it's short; compared to Jak and Daxter, which took about 13-20 hours to beat, it's short; and in contrast with say, Donkey Kong Country or Banjo-Kazooie, it's short. Did I like the game? Oh yes. Did I want to play lots more? Oh yes. Is there any issue? It all depends on how long you take to play a game, but for me, Sly Cooper could have easily used at least one or more worlds as tough as the final one. I guess the other thing that adds to this feeling of shortness, is its relative easiness. For the first three worlds I wasn't heavily challenged at all. The last two were harder, but not hard. The last two are somewhat challenging, but still only the last world required major restarting.Sly Cooper is also rife with slowdown problems. The larger levels aren't as large as those in Jak and Daxter and in some cases less is going on, but there is significant lulling in various areas of the game. Strangely, few of the slowdown areas occur when multiple enemies are on screen. They happen in large, hub areas and they happen quite frequently. Truth be told, it's more of an eyesore than a gameplay problem. Rarely did the slowdown hamper the gameplay directly, but with such a pretty, well-animated and luscious looking game, it's a real shame to see such blatant slowdown so often. Added to that, some minor problems include occasionally fishy camera angles and buggy sections. For instance, the camera gets stuck inside a building that Sly has left, leaving him open for attack by an enemy. And sometimes it just gets stuck inside an area. In the last level of the last world where Sly is racing against time to beat the lava from killing him, the camera got stuck inside the final construct, and it took me about a minute to figure out how to unstick it. With regard to buggy sections, in Vicious Voodoo, Sly fell onto a log on the outskirts of watery bog. He could not jump or double jump to get back to land, and every time he hit the water, he has automatically brought back to the log. Essentially he was stuck and so I had to restart the level. Are these huge problems? Nah, but there are noticeable enough to mention.
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