Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus

"The Perfect Rental"

I dislike renting videogames. Unless you live very close to a good store (like I used to), you can lose a lot of time shuttling back and forth between the video store. But every once in a while, a game comes out that you just HAVE to play, except it's so short it's not worth buying. Such is Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus.

I love all games (except Strategy and RPG--RPG's?! Why perform a million mindless fetch quests just for a cutscene?). Playing through a friend's Jak and Daxter reinvigorated my love of platformers I haven't felt since Mario 64, and Metal Gear Solid 2 and the even better Hitman 2 (I reviewed for PC) introduced me to a new love: Stealth action. So why not combine the two? Because it's stupid. But in Sly Cooper, it's done well.

PRESENTATION - 8

Sly Cooper definitely has a look all its own, and one worth renting just to see.

GRAPHICS - 8

The ''Toon-shaded'' (whatever, it's Cel-shaded) look is nice. I didn't sense the whole looks-like-you're-playing-a-cartoon, but it IS nice graphically. The game helps create the sense that you're in an interactive world, and visual variety is good. Problem is, there can be severe framerate slowdown, ironically appearing most often when I was messing with the Slow time thief skill. Of course, fast load times rock. Always.

AUDIO - 4

I have no real problems with the background music; unless it's superb I never notice it, and everything sounds right.
The problem is the voice acting; it's grating, particularly of your two sidekicks, but I'll get to that in,

STORY - 6

On the one hand, I like the story. A descendant of a long line of thieves, Sly Cooper is out to defeat those who stole the book which contains the Cooper family secrets of stealing. As you progress in the game, more and more recovered pages from the Thievius Raccoonus will yield more sneaking powers for Sly to mess around with. It's good, and nicely reminiscent of 70's Martial Arts movies where an entire style is transcribed into a much-valued book or scroll.

The problem is the good guys' character design. All the bad guys look and sound great, but the good guys; I like that a thief protagonist is a raccoon, but does he have to dress up like the pansiest raccoon in a blue bell-boy outfit? Your two allies, the turtle and hippo, are gratingly over-exaggerated stereotypes of the intelligent nerd and the dumb guy respectively. Sly himself sounds fine. But this isn't enough to detract even the Story score below average.

CONTROL - 8

The control is very good. Left analog stick moves Sly with precision, X jumps and double-jumps, and Square attacks with Sly's cane. Circle uses a regular context-sensitive sneaking skill, such as latching your cane out to grab on to shimmy-able poles, or hooks you can swing across (left analog to build up steam, then jump to let go). Also, Sly can ''sense sneaking opportunities'' in the form of blue glows near walls. Pressing circle near these will usually do Metal Gear Solid wall-hugging things, useful for evading enemy spotlights.

In all things, it is a joy to control Sly and make him crawl across poles and vines, jumping from hook to hook. The right analog stick moves the camera, the L1 button brings up your binoculars, and the R1 button centers the view. Camera control is not an issue in this game.

The detractor here is the Master Thief Skills. Once acquired from a safe, you cycle through them with R2 and L2, then hold Triangle to use. This works for some, but it makes it impossible to chain MTS attacks successfully. Furthermore, it is annoying that to keep time slowed down, I have to hold down triangle (except during a jump), rather than just tapping it once to toggle it on. This makes the Slow technique harder to use while controlling the rest of Sly's arsenal, although maybe the developers didn't want it to make the game too easy this way.

GAMEPLAY - 8

The game itself is superb. Worthy of a 10, except I consider anything (including Value and/or Replay) not covered by the first 2 categories as part of the gameplay.

Sly has to restart if he gets killed. He can collect up to 2 lucky horseshoes (lying around or by getting 100 coins), which take the blows for him. However, each level has numerous checkpoints (take that, Shinobi!), so you never feel like the developers are trying to punish the player. If you die 5 times, you must restart from the beginning of the level.

The majority of the game involves sneaking around enemy spotlights, searchlights, and lasers. The automatic defenses are yellow, but turn into red lights once alerted. If they touch you a second time (once red), you lose a life. Of course, an alarm at the end of each sub-area can be destroyed to deactivate them.

Enemies are around as well, in 2 categories. Either they attack you when you get near, making you knock them out, or they have flashlights. In the latter case, stepping in the flashlight beam results in them automatically shooting you (you can't dodge their homing shots), so you'll have to sneak around them.

Don't get me wrong; Sly is a FAST game. Faster than any supposed stealth game ever made. In fact, one of the Master Thief Skills you can collect is called ''Fast,'' whose only, ONLY, ONLY purpose is to speed up time so you can get pastareas you've been through faster or get enemies to move in their patrolling route faster. How cool is that? How cool is it when the developers are so concerned that you might find the game boring that they give you a superpower just to speed up the play? Not that you REALLY need it, because this game doesn't have slow moments.

That's right; NO SLOW MOMENTS. Level design is SUPERB. Amazing. You're never bored, never slogging through a level thinking ''ugh...how long until I can get to the next, hopefully better level'' like you are in EVERY OTHER GAME (including Vice City) at least occasionally. These levels are laid-out exceptionally well, making for a wonderful, if linear, experience. Plus, there are great minigames in every world to vary up (but never dominate) your experience. I love the cover-the-ally-with-the-sniper-rifle, but my favorite all-around level is the last platforming level on the final world: it forces you to use every trick you've learned throughout the game (minus the optional Master Thief Skills).

This game is a little too easy, but that's partially because there are no roadblocks on the road to fun. Most levels also have Clue Bottles; find them all, and you can open the Safe, which gives you a Master Thief Skill (such as throwing out a silouehette-shadow Decoy. Throw it into an enemy flashlight path, the enemy will attack the decoy, then you can attack them during their gloating animation.). Further, beating each of 5 bosses will yield another standard sneaking skill, one of which is the ability to be invisible in plain sight as long as you don't move (subsequent worlds' levels are designed for your new skills). My favorite is the one allowing you to run and slide on very narrow rails.

Here's the problem: length. There are 5 worlds, 7 levels each and one boss. Each level can take you 5 minutes if you don't get all the clue bottles (I did as I played it through), so that's not enough playing time. There is, however, an added challenge: each platforming level has a Master Thief Sprint, a test of your ability to beat the level in about a 70-second or less time period. You need this to unlock a bonus cutscene, but ...it's IMPOSSIBLE. Even knowing all the shortcuts, avoiding all the enemies, never faltering, I still can't do this even on the first stage. So it's not such a replay value. The major replay value is the game itself, which is so fun I'll probably beat it a second time later on.

A lot of 8's, huh? Well, the game does excel uniformly through and through, with minor issues that never detract from the experience. But since you can easily beat it halfway into the rental period, I can't really recommend you buy it. It's shorter than Jak and Daxter (at least considering that I did EVERYTHING in that game in one play-through). Adam Sessler of Extended Play said, ''...you can finish Sly Cooper in three sittings. Some might say that it's too short, but no, it's just that good.'' Well, it IS just that good, but it's also just that short.

I want to buy Ratchet and Clank. Buy this only if you're a real fan of platformers, or if there's no rental stores near you. However, for bargain-bin $20 a year from now, this would be a great deal.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 12/16/02, Updated 01/01/03