By Michael Lowell

March 24, 2010

Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves
Playstation 2
Developed: Sucker Punch Productions
Published: Sony Computer Entertainment America
Released: September 26, 2005  (North America)

Note: This review contains spoilers.

I got a question that needs to be answered: What the hell happened to Sly Cooper?

In the world where Crash Bandicoot: The Wrath of Cortex never happened (and it’s perfectly okay to pretend that game didn’t), Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus was the sequel to Crash Bandicoot: Warped.  It wasn’t bad.  Touted by games journalists as a sleeper hit, Sly crept his way into million-seller status. Problem with that: The bandicoot was selling millions.  That is, multiple millions.  Sly Cooper was the heir apparent to that gravy train.  As far as Sony was concerned, “one-million-seller” wasn’t getting the job done.  And thus, changes were made.  Sly 2: Band of Thieves was Grand Theft Auto with more animals and fewer vehicles.  Nobody understood that open-world games had and still have issues.  Good luck delivering on quality level design when your selling point is “Massive, sprawling worlds!”  But hey, games journalists liked it even more than the first!  And positive reviews push sales, right?  Ka-ching?  Not really.  The Sly 2 sales racket was a disappointment.  The game sold worse than the predecessor.  It’s very easy to get the image of Sony suits breathing down the backs of the employees at Sucker Punch Productions.  “The first three Crash Bandicoot games sold twenty million fucking copies!  What the hell is going on down there?  Get your shit together!”  I doubt that the corporate office was going to accept “But the market for platforming games on the PlayStation 2 is loaded!” for an answer.  Clearly, the formula sucked and it needed to be fixed.

Well, how should I explain this?  You ever watch a sports team dump quality coaches because the team’s level of success is not successful enough?  “We respect that you got to the second round of the playoffs.  Now get the fuck out.”  Those franchises eventually get the coach they deserve.  And then the team tanks in the standings and the head coach gets into fist-fights with his assistants and Al Davis really needs to stop being old.  Such is the life of the Oakland Raiders.  Come round three, that’s the Sly Cooper series.  The first and second games were good but they “weren’t good enough”. Sly 3 now gets to pose as the big mistake of a coaching hire and a change in philosophy for the series.  Sly 3 is a single-player party game stuck in the Sly Cooper universe. What the hell?  A party game?  Really?  Yes, it’s a party game.  It’s a party game and I plan to judge it as such. Sly 3 has all the hallmarks of party games: Minigames posing as critical mission objectives; an entire roster of playable characters (many with little rhyme or reason for their appearance in the game); a markedly lighter and more relaxed tone than previous games in the franchise; characters emerging from previous games for the purpose of “But I thought I took you out!!1″  It is time to explain why this is a very bad idea.

Think of some party games.  What are the best in that bunch?  If you answered with Mario Party, you completely missed the damn point.  “Party game” is to video games what “family-friendly” is to movies:  It’s a way of selling sub-par products to an ill-informed audience.  Most people will see their favorite characters and the “brand recognition” bulb will pop over their head.  “It has Mario on it!  And he’s playing basketball!  That must mean it’s a great game!”  That is why Namco released Pac-Man Party for the Nintendo Wii during the same week the company released Pac-Man Championship Edition DX for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360: Because your mom doesn’t know what Metacritic is and doesn’t know Pac-Man Party has an average score of 59.* She just knows that Pac-Man Party is a “party game”, and that’s a much easier sell than “2010 Game of the Year candidate”, whatever that is.  Yup.  When I think of great party games, I think of Doom, I think of Perfect Dark, I think of Rock Band, I think of Super Smash Brothers.  The best party games aren’t defined by marketing labels.  They best party games are great video games.  “Party games” never have a chance to develop an identity because they don’t want to.  They’re looking to dance from level to level and mission to mission with such force that players don’t pick up on the faults.  They’re deliberately shallow.  Now, I’m not arguing Sly 3 was marketed as a party game.  I’m arguing that the philosophy of party game development had its hands all over Sly 3.  And now, Honor Among Thieves has nothing honorable to present the paying audience.

The warning signs should have been apparent from the start, where you’re looking to crack the Sly Cooper family vault with the help of new-but-anonymous team members.  Any long-time television viewer knows that “new characters” is a death sentence.  But it’s still easier to do in television.  You don’t have to make each of those new characters “fun to play”.  You don’t have to customize “missions” and tailor “levels” to match each of those characters’ “skill sets”.  One playable character and one skill set is almost always good enough for the world of platforming.  Sucker Punch vehemently disagreed and bumped the magic number of playable characters from Sly 2′s three all the way to eight.  Unfortunately, “number of characters that are fun to play” is still hammered at one.  Sly Cooper is once again the lone hawk.  The rest of the army is total throwaway.  Two different characters settle their duties in third-person gunfights, both featuring a form of aim assistance that makes Modern Warfare 2 look like microscopic surgery.  One character usurps Bentley’s established duties as “remote control guru”, splitting one character’s skill set into two.  Another takes up deep sea diving duties.  And for what?  One acrobatic squirrel can’t handle the platforming duties and leave the change-of-pace missions to the supporting characters?  This is the bad side of complexity, children.  You introduce new characters in order to increase the number of ways that a game can be played, not as a means to streamline and simplify the utility of each character and their playstyle.

Remember what I said about retro games: The simpler the mechanics, the harder you have to punish the player for failing at them.  From character to character, Sly 3 plays simpler.  It’s less complex.  So where’s the difficulty spike?  It’s not there.  Sly 3 is the easiest of the Sly Cooper games.  It’s almost laughably easy.  The only counter-balance to the shallow difficulty level is a pocketful of aggravating and poorly-designed missions.  Take a look at how the game overworlds handle difficulty.  Sly 2 had it right.  In the previous game, alerting enemies to your presence meant taking some scrapes.  You very often had to fight your way out of the situation.  The problem was not the difficulty level, it was the level design.  Navigating your way around those guards could become a chore.  There weren’t many interesting ways to evade the enemy when you were caught in an alleyway or stuck atop a cookie-cutter roof.  Sucker Punch had to fix the level design and they didn’t.  They simply made the artificial intelligence less aggressive.  They made the game less difficult.  The crack-shot watch-guards are now gone, replaced with a cast of stumbling idiots who would feel at home in a Halo multiplayer match.  The guards are also far more comfortable with giving up.  Sucker Punch hasn’t addressed whether traveling through the overworld was fun.  They simply made it easier to do so.  And I don’t know about you guys, but I’ve played a lot of games where you can run from Point A to Point B and ignore every obstacle in your path.  If it didn’t have “Mario” on the front of the box, the consumer usually savaged it.

So the game’s left to fall back on its mission and level design.  It’s the only thing that can save the game.  That’s where the fantastic party fun walks through the door! One mission requires the player to stymie a sabotage operation by using the face buttons to activate traps.  Another requires you to out-pirate-talk another pirate.  Seriously.  That’s only the beginning.   There’s helicopter wars.  There’s racing segments featuring remote-controlled cars.  There’s also chapters built around airplane battles and pirate wars on the high seas.  A number of these modes seem to exist simply to fill in a checkbox for the marketing team that “For the first time ever, Sly Cooper does battle with his friends in new multiplayer modes!”.  Gimmicks at their finest.  That is, party gaming at its worst.  The majority of these missions get progressively more difficult while you’re attempting to complete them.  That is, the opposition bands into progressively larger waves of baddies.  The problem?  You don’t have to think more creatively about dealing with the added baggage.  The missions simply get more difficult rather than more challenging.  (And let’s note: “More difficult” is relative.  This doesn’t mean any of these missions prove to be any hard.)  That means more baddies flowing through the floodgates, more targets to destroy on the second lap of a race, more zombies to kill as you protect critical mission targets.  Platforming is secondary now.  Proper run-and-jump action is all secondary to minigames and flying missions and racing missions and shit that doesn’t need to be in the game.

At least the previous titles were good for a couple of laughs.  If Sly 3 was a nineties cartoon or an animated Disney sequel (think The Jungle Book 2 or The Return of Jafar), I’d think the game was created for the sole purpose of hocking merchandise.  We’ve already gone over the roster additions.  A number of these additional characters are villains from previous games.  You put them in jail.  For whatever reason, you’re now soliciting for their help.  Yes, the criminals you had little problem disposing of are now necessary allies for “the big heist”.  As far as delivery and dialogue and storyline are concerned, the first and second Sly Cooper games were obscenely dead-pan.  That’s what made the characters and situations amusing.  The third game openly acknowledges the absurdity, as characters inquire and ask “What did you just say?”  The characters don’t know how to respond and it doesn’t seem like the writers do, either.  If a completely different writing crew didn’t create this third act, then somebody had an out-of-body experience.  The game teases a much darker universe (Murray has disappeared and committed to a life of non-violence following the accident that confined Bentley to a wheelchair at the end of Sly 2) and gives up on the premise about two chapters in.  The tight and deliberate writing is toast.  The “adult game for kids” now feels like a “kid game for kids”.

Let’s example-toss to set the situation.  It’s a solid summary of the story problems.  The third chapter requires the player to court the services of a remote-control whiz by the name of Penelope.  The Cooper Gang™ requires her moxy to conduct the series of remote-control missions that Bentley had little issue conducting in the first game.  The goal?  Prove your worth by winning a dogfighting competition.  No, the airplane kind.  Despite having zero flight experience, this proves little trouble for Cooper.  Sabotaging the competition doesn’t hurt, but “Sly Cooper wins” is still a stretch.  After defeating the Black Baron at his own game, it’s down to a battle of fisticuffs.  Bentley warns Sly that the Black Baron is a “master pugilist”.  And after Cooper wins the battle, the Black Baron outs herself as Penelope!  See, she was just trying to get around the event’s age requirements!  So she made a disguise and won the thing!  And his celebrity boiled over to the point where she was able to organize and sponsor the whole tournament!  Sound ridiculous?  No?  Two chapters later, your latest adversary captures a terror-stricken Penelope who has apparently forgotten that she is a “master pugilist”.  She does nothing to stop it.  Because apparently, she’s defenseless.  Or something.

The storyline is irredeemable and most of the game seems to follow suit.  It’s sloppy stuff.  There’s clearly a decent platformer to be found in this ruckus.  The first game was pretty good at platforming and so was the second.  The game engine hasn’t significantly changed.  The camera is still wonky, but it’s tolerable.  Sly 3 simply doesn’t play well.  But hey, there’s supposedly a fourth Sly Cooper game on the way.  That’s what the Sly Cooper Collection teased.  Go for it, Sucker Punch.  You tried to throw a rocking party game with Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves and you only got one party quality down: I’m trying to get the taste of something out of my mouth.  The “final game in the trilogy” simply didn’t get the job done.

P.S.: Oh, and the game is packaged with red-blue three-dimensional glasses.  You can play some of the levels with these glasses.  And then stereoscopic input was never heard from again.  Or at least that would be a proper reward for the headache I received.

1 out of 5

(Games rated one-out-of-five have problems. Big problems. Unplayable? Possibly not. But even the target audience won’t find much to like.)

Return to the main page.

Special Thanks To:

IGN’s Screenshot Gallery For The Pretty Pictars