How does Sly Cooper’s first adventure hold up today?
What Is It? Sly is the latest in a long line of Cooper family Master Thieves. They are on the Robin Hood side of thiefdom, making sure to only right wrongs to those who deserve it. Sly and his pals Bentley and Murray must track down the lost pages of the Cooper family’s master thieving guide: The Thievius Raccoonus.
Sly is an action, stealth, platformer wrapped in a sense of humor and a wonderful cartoon art style. Most levels will have you playing as Sly through a linear area attempting to retrieve a key at the end. There will be plenty of enemies along the way, most of which are better off taking out with stealth or ignoring completely as getting hit will usually end your life back to a checkpoint unless you’ve collected a lucky horseshoe since last getting hit. Levels also feature many automated alarm systems you must avoid such as spotlights, electrical flooring, and a bunch of rotating dangers you must time your jumps over.
Sly’s main moveset comes down to his handy family cane and his dexterity. Use the cane to knock out bad guys or swing on hooks. The platforming moves mostly show up with a glowing purple sparkle on the screen indicating to press the “do a stealth thing” button on the controller. A representative sequence in this game might look like this: jump onto a pillar, hit the stealth button to perch atop, wait for an obstacle to clear before jumping, swing on a hook, and make your way to the landing zone. Then, avoid a spotlight by sneaking around the back edge of a column, taking out the alarm on the other side to turn off the lights. Much of the heavy lifting is done through that stealth button as it will often “pull” you to the place you need to be, but your platforming does need to be precise enough to allow that to happen and there are certainly many jumps which do not have the magic stealth move magnetism at all.
Along the way, you can collect a set of green bottles in each level with a full set in any given level providing you with the combination to a safe in that level. This will unlock a new move for Sly. These moves are not essential but are certainly helpful. Finding the bottles is never a super arduous task, just a nice additional excuse to spend time with this game.
Beyond the traditional levels, there are a few minigame-type levels. You will control the team van as Murray in a top-down race game, have to protect team members by sniping enemies from far away, and a few others. Later entries in the series would lean into the minigame aspect a bit more, but the balance here is nice. Only the racing levels get annoying as you need to run a pretty perfect race to win, but it is still a fun time.
The core gameplay loop of Sly Cooper is to arrive at a location, progress through a short level, finding a key at the end which unlocks the larger open area, find a few keys within linear levels, use those to unlock another open-ish area, find the keys in the linear sub-levels there which will unlock the way to a boss fight. Defeat the boss and move onto the next location on the globe.
The boss fights are pretty good. They each have their own gimmick and require full restarts when you get hit. They will likely take you at least a couple of tries, but they are not especially difficult by any means.
The Best Part: The overall vibe of this game. It is all tied together with a wonderful cartoon art style that still shines today, even if the muted color pallet could use some brightening. Sly Cooper is a likeable, slightly irreverent protagonist with a very fun would-be foil in Interpol officer Carmelita Fox. Bentley and Murray each have unique personalities which shine when they are on screen. The actual bosses are a bit bland and the overarching plot is paper thin, but none of that gets in the way of wanting to spend time in these bright, colorful levels with diverse themes.
The Worst Part: It’s unfair to this game, but my only real complaint here is that the sequels add a lot to the game. I actually prefer the linear style in this game to the more open-area style of those, but the gameplay improvements are impossible to ignore. Everything in Sly Cooper is good, but the later games prove that it can all be a little bit better.
The Verdict: Sly Cooper, this game and the series in general, scream “video game version of a Saturday morning cartoon” to me. Each level being an episode, with the occasional boss fights, all leading up to the finale with the big boss. Carmelita provides a nice recurring guest character who blurs the line between friend and foe. The sidekicks, Bentley and Murray, are there for comic relief. It works, trust me on this.
Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus sets the groundwork for a classic series. The action, stealth, platforming combination gameplay holds up quite well today and it all gets wrapped in a wonderful art style and plenty of charm. I had a great time replaying it, and grabbing the platinum via the Sly Collection, for this review and would absolutely recommend the game to anyone over 20 years after its release.
How to Play: PlayStation 2. Sly Collection: PlayStation 3*/4/5/Vita
*console played on for this review
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