Thursday, May 29, 2014

Video Game Review: Sly Cooper PS2 Trilogy


In the video game industry, a key aspect of debate that has been going on for years is the ‘console war’ between all of the major video game consoles released onto the market, like when the SNES faced off against the Sega Genesis or the PlayStation went up against the Nintendo 64. Nowadays, it’s between three consoles; the Wii U, the PlayStation 4, and the Xbox One. And I’m just going to come out and say it… I think that this whole ‘console war’ thing is really stupid and quite honestly rather pointless. So what if someone gets one of the three major consoles and it’s not the most popular one? Like what if they bought a Wii U but everyone else got a PS4 or an Xbox One? If they like it, then the more power to them. In my case, I’m a big Nintendo fan even though the company, while still playing a key part in the video game market, is now sort of in the back of the pack behind Sony and Microsoft. The Nintendo 64 was the first video game console I ever owned and most of my favorite video games of all time came from, you guessed it, Nintendo. I don’t own a Wii U at this time, but I’m considering possibly getting one in the future. For the record though, I have ventured out and bought a few non-Nintendo consoles over the years and probably the one that I’ve used the most aside from all Nintendo consoles was the PlayStation 2, which is currently the best-selling video game console of all time with over 155 million units sold since it was first released in 2000.


During its run, the PS2 (and basically Sony for that matter) may not have really had a definitive mascot like Mario with Nintendo or Master Chief from Halo for Xbox, but there were a lot of pretty good franchises released during the PS2 era, including series such as ‘Jak and Daxter’, ‘Ratchet and Clank’, and ‘Kingdom Hearts’. However, my personal favorite Sony franchise would have to be one that apparently wasn’t as successful as those franchises, but is still a really good series; the ‘Sly Cooper’ franchise, which was originally developed by Sucker Punch Productions before they moved on to the ‘Infamous’ franchise (Sanzaru Games took over after that, beginning with the PS3 re-mastered re-release of the original three games and then releasing the fourth main game in the series). Not only that, but there’s actually a full-length animated movie in the works slated for a 2016 release. But for now, we’ll be looking at the first three Sly Cooper games, all of which were released for the PlayStation 2; ‘Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus’, ‘Sly 2: Band of Thieves’, and ‘Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves’. I don’t own a PS3 at this time so this won’t include the most recent entry in the series, ‘Sly 4: Thieves in Time’ though I hope that one day I can finally play that one.


Taking place in a world fully inhabited by anthropomorphic creatures, the series focuses on the titular Sly Cooper, a raccoon whose family, the Cooper clan, is known for being world-famous master thieves. Each member of the family has passed down their techniques to each new generation through a book known as the ‘Thievius Raccoonus’. But before Sly is able to inherit the book, a gang of criminals known as the ‘Fiendish Five’ kill Sly’s father and steal the book. Sly ends up at an orphanage but while there, he meets his future partners in crime, tech genius Bentley the Turtle and muscle-man Murray the Hippo. Years later, they team up and travel the world, while also trying to avoid the law (primarily inspector Carmelita Fox, Sly’s nemesis/love interest), in order to stop the Fiendish Five so that Sly can take back his inheritance. In ‘Sly 2’ (don’t worry, I won’t spoil anything major from these games), Sly and the gang deal with another gang, the Klaww Gang, who have stolen some extremely valuable parts that could spell trouble if they’re put back together. Finally, in ‘Sly 3’, Sly, Bentley, and Murray round up a team of ‘specialists’ in order to help Sly get into the ‘Cooper Vault’, which contains his family’s entire fortune.


One of the things that I find really interesting about this series is that each game’s engine was built by improving on the engine from its predecessor. In short, each game got better as the series went on. Now while I’m basically saying that ‘Sly 2’ and ‘Sly 3’ were the best games in this trilogy, I’m not saying that the first ‘Sly Cooper’ game was bad; far from it in fact. It was a very enjoyable platforming game with solid controls and plenty of fun stealth elements thrown in. However, there are certain aspects about the game that were rather frustrating, with the most notable being that it operated on a ‘one-hit’ system. If Sly was hit just once, you’d lose a life and would have to start over either from the beginning of the level or a checkpoint (if you’ve reached one). You could find ‘lucky charms’ throughout the level (represented by horseshoes), which would give you extra hit points but at the most you could only get hit three times and that’s it. Some other problems included a bit too much repetition in certain areas and some missions that were… well, I won’t say ‘hard’ but they could get rather frustrating and in most cases that’s because of the whole one-hit problem that I mentioned earlier.

Thankfully, the two sequels removed the ‘one-hit’ system and instead gave the player a full life bar, which was definitely a welcome change. The hub worlds in both sequels were also much more expansive and offered a lot more chances for exploration whereas in the first game there wasn’t much to explore within the game’s hub worlds. But probably the best new change made with these games was that they offered much more variety in regards to the gameplay. You see, the first ‘Sly’ game had about only 3-4 mission types (not counting boss fights); stealth missions, driving missions, shooting missions, and one hacking mission. All of Sly’s stealth missions had the exact same objective; get to the end of the level and find a key that you use to unlock more of the hub world and ultimately to get to the boss and the other missions had you collecting keys as well. ‘Sly 2’ and ‘Sly 3’ offered much more variety in regards to the missions, referred to in these two games as ‘jobs’. Not only did you get more interesting missions to do, but you could also play as Bentley and Murray whereas in the first game you only got to play as them for brief moments in racing and hacking missions.

Overall, I think my personal favorite game of the three would have to be ‘Sly 3’, which might be because this was the first one of this series that I played even though I completed the other two games first. Also, I had to actually buy another copy of the game (along with another copy of ‘Sly 2’ for that matter) because both games had this odd problem where the game ‘froze’ but not in the usual case of a game freezing. The game still ran but the dialogue wasn’t progressing forward (It's kind of hard to explain, and unfortunately I can't provide a link to a video of this problem at the time I'm writing this). Anyway, back to ‘Sly 3’; the game had the best variety out of all of these three games in both the unique line-up of villains (no gang association this time) and the fact that in this game, Sly and the gang recruit a few new members into the game as well. Heck, they even team up with some of their enemies from previous games in the series. Of course, as it was common throughout the trilogy, each game featured some excellent writing/voice acting (though in the case of the latter, for some reason Carmelita was voiced by three different actresses in these games… and none of them even had the same accent), a full cast of memorable characters, and were just really fun to play.


So those were the first 3 Sly Cooper games, and out of all of the PS2 games that I’ve played over the years, these three games are definitely amongst my favorites. All 3 of the games had solid controls and fun stealth gameplay although I mostly prefer the second and third games due to the more frustrating elements of the first Sly Cooper. Again, I’m not saying that game was bad but it’s just that I wish that they had done something better than just having the whole game operate on a ‘one-hit’ health system, which really got annoying in certain areas. Thankfully, ‘Sly 2’ and ‘Sly 3’ got rid of that system. So now, it looks like this series is running again with ‘Sly 4’ for the PS3, which continued the series after the third one seemingly ended the story though had a bit of a cliffhanger at the end of the game. I’m interested in seeing where this series goes now and as for that movie coming out in two years, I’m hoping for the best. After all, video games and movies haven’t always worked well together but who knows? Maybe this could break that unlucky streak of video game movies… but only time will tell.

Ratings:

Sly 1: 4/5

Sly 2: 5/5!

Sly 3: 5/5!
 
 

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