Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves
Too much of a good thing.
Tags: Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves Categories: PS2 Reviews, Reviews
Posted by Brad on Oct 13th, 2005
| Title | Players | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves (title page) | 1 | ||
| Developer | Publisher | Genre | Online |
| Action | No | ||
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It feels strange, completely foreign really, to criticize a developer for giving you exactly what you want, but unfortunately that is the position I find myself in now. After completing last year’s Sly Cooper 2: Band of Thieves, I wanted nothing more than for developer Suckerpunch Productions to get right back into the trenches and bring forth another triumph of modern platforming action starring the Cooper Gang. The series had a strong start and a superior sequel going for it, so I watched and waited for the third installment with childlike impatience. Sadly, while still better than other examples of the genre, Sly Cooper 3: Honor Among Thieves reaches too far, too hesitantly to live up to its progenitors.
Let’s begin this bout of nitpickery with the observation that this game is by far the longest of the three, with hours upon hours upon hours of play. It falls into the same episodic structure as Band of Thieves in that separate chapters are played through as a sort of Saturday morning cartoon, encapsulating the game’s levels in little micro-plots that all push along the main narrative.
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Honor Among Thieves does this as well, but in flashback form. You begin the story as raccoon master thief Sly Cooper, trying to break into his own family’s vault, currently under watch by the evil Doctor M. But his usual gang of cohorts, consisting of brainy tech-turtle Bentley and powerhouse hippo Murray are not enough to pull off the job. Worse, Murray, blaming himself for an accident that put Bentley in a wheelchair, has gone off on a spiritual quest to find himself .
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The main portion of the game is a sort of Oceans-11-esque recruitment tour, picking up a few new teammates to round out the crew for this mammoth job. Among the new faces are Murray’s spiritual Guru, a purple koala capable of taking over enemies minds and racing their berserk bodies around the levels; a remote controls expert in the form of mousey Penelope, and a couple of old Cooper nemesis, the explosives expert Panda King and lounge-lizard-come-frogman Dimitri.
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Now, the collection of these cohorts involves a set of mission objectives in each of their respective realms. You’ll have to clear out the Guru’s Outback of polluting miners and rescue the Panda King’s daughter. All this is well and good, but I found that, unlike in previous games, these tasks tended to stretch on and on into silliness, and more often than not actually detracted from the main plot of the game. By the time I had my crew together and was ready to make my raid on the Cooper family fortune, I had forgotten the reason why Sly was being crushed to death by Doctor M’s enormous mutant-robot-gorilla-…thing.
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In past games, the missions all tied together in a fairly smooth manner. When Bentley laid out his plan of attack on how to get things accomplished, they made sense in their own cartoonish way. That didn’t come across as well in this game, and a few of the longer strings of tasks just felt like you were filling time, like they had introduced so many characters to the gang that they needed to send some out there to do their specialized thing rather than just getting on with the mission. It was as if Bentley were to announce: “Ok, Panda King, I need you to go out there and put on a spectacular fireworks display to distract the pirate LaFweet. Meanwhile, Murray will break into his dungeon and rescue Penelope. And Sly? You go bake a pie. LaFweet really likes pie.”
Of course it’s not that abstract, but there are points in the game where you genuinely forget what this is all about. This is not a matter of there being too much story. I would love it for that to be the case. This is a matter of that story being too far spread out. It wasn’t tight. It wasn’t polished. It was just there, sprawling.
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The game has evolved completely away from the collection-platformer model of the first title. Gone are the clue bottles and other little hidden items to snatch and grab. This time it’s just about the continuation of story and its presentation through as many possible mini-game types as Suckerpunch could create, which, as it turns out, is a whole heck of a lot. They are so varied and different that you’ll seldom finding yourself doing the same thing twice, and wanting more of the good ones, such as the fantastic hidden-safe-combination-in-the-wall-paintings game. Whether or not this is a good thing is, of course, up to the player who might favor a little more of Sly’s jumping and climbing (which remains the epitome of platformer character control) to Penelope’s remote control helicopter flying or Panda King’s Panzer-Dragoon-esque fireworks shooting.
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Me, I liked it, despite how it slowed the game down. I did find a few instances, however, of wondering exactly why a particular mini-game was even in there to begin with. There are points where you seem to be having branched conversations with other characters, pressing the circle, triangle, or square button to come up with a particular response, but there doesn’t really seem to be any effect to doing them wrong or out of order. In one place, a pirate insult competition reflective of the Monkey Island games breaks out and makes good use of this technique, but all other instances seem to be entirely without point. Then, there are places where Sly will have to disguise himself and, when questioned by the guards, present the correct password in order to pass unharmed. Sounds fine, but the button sequence that comprises the passwords is given to you by Bentley literally two seconds before you have to enter it. It’s not the most challenging memory test we’ve seen over the years.
On the other hand, the inclusion of a piracy game – in which you steer your ship around the sea, tactically maneuvering to bring your broadside to bear on enemy vessels, then board and defeat their captain for cold, hard treasure – is an incredible success, and can provide you with much needed funds to purchase all the extra moves and powerups the game offers through the ThiefNet computer network.
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There’s not a lot new on the graphical front, apart from the inclusion of a few true-3D levels, sporadic missions that offer you the opportunity to don included red and blue glasses and get an extra degree of depth out of the game. Those missions are few enough as to remain novel, and, for the most part, are actually well realized. One scene in particular, a fight with Chinese Chicken General Tsao amidst a bamboo forest is quite accentuated by the glasses, though others don’t quite show off the technology to quite as impressive a degree. The hardest of these stages can result in more headache than fun if you are exposed to them for long stretches of time. Thankfully, you can chose to play the levels without the glasses if you so choose. Still, a nice additional gimmick from Suckerpunch’s seemingly never-ending bag of tricks.
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One point of criticism that ought to be raised is in the realm of sound, particularly the voice acting. I don’t know what happened to the actor playing super-cop/love-interest Carmelita Fox in the first two games, but her replacement was absolutely atrocious in this game. Bad to a degree that exceeded comedy. This was actually a problem in this game more than the others, and extended to some of the other characters. The forementioned General Tsao was another standout for completely horrible dialogue, to the degree that it dragged the rest of the characters down with him.
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Let this be said: despite the criticism I’ve laid at their feet thus far, Suckerpunch have not created a bad game in Sly Cooper: Honor Among Thieves. Rather, what they’ve accomplished is to set such a high bar for themselves with their previous games that the imperfections of this game mar its surface all the more. That they are able to churn out this much game in one year since their last release is admirable, but at the same time shows a lack of focus. It needs tightening around all the seams, cutting off of needless mission chaff, and to latch on to the formula they found in Band of Thieves.
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Platform fans should buy this game. Sly Cooper fans will buy this game regardless. But if you do, temper your expectations and try not to hold fast to what came before. Suckerpunch has gone off in a great many directions with this title, some that work and some that don’t. Think of it as a practice in mechanics for a great many styles of gameplay. By the individual mission, it’s fantastic. On the whole, it’s not tight enough to rank amongst their best.
| What Works | Score |
|---|---|
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- Still the best-controlled platformer out there - Tons of variety, great new technology. - Well-realized 3D-glasses levels. Not overdone. |
8.2 |
| What Doesn't | |
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- Story was too sprawling, lacked focus. - Mission objectives frequently fell to just silliness, took away from series’ strengths. - A couple of real stinkers in the voice acting department. |
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| Under the Shrink-wrap | |
| A good game, but doesn't live up to the Cooper family name. | |
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Tags: Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves
Posted by Brad on Oct 13th, 2005 and is filed under PS2 Reviews, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can post a comment, or trackback from your own site.
