Sly Cooper: Thieves In Time — More Sly, For Better Or Worse

Callum Petch

On September the 29th of 2012, a wannabe games journalist named Callum Petch made a three-hour trip down to London, England to attend the Eurogamer Expo — the UK’s premier videogame… err… expo. His mission? To preview as many games as humanly possible in one day. These are his stories…

So, yes, my initial opinions on Sly Cooper: Thieves In Time may have been tainted by my overjoyed relief at actually being able to play the damned thing.  Please forgive me, I am only human.  But, far removed from that initial relief, I still really enjoyed my time with the new Sly.  Like DmC, this is a series that has now seen a change of developer (in this case, Sanzaru Games are taking over from Sucker Punch, so that the latter can focus on the inFamous series, although how they can do that after inFamous 2 is beyond me… sorry, off-topic) and, just like DmC, the new developers haven’t cocked everything up.

However, this does come with a big catch.  You see; whereas DmC fostered feelings of excitement not felt in the series for half a decade by trying new things and re-inventing itself, Sly Cooper: Thieves In Time is merely just another Sly game.  This is not necessarily a bad thing, a nice honest-to-Maker platformer is a rarity nowadays, but it does mean that I can’t help but come away a teensy bit disappointed.  The new development team had the chance to try new things and take risks, but have, instead, played it safe.

But let’s start with the good.  This is very much a Sly Cooper game.  You are placed in a level and are tasked with getting from point A to point B.  Standing in your way are various traps, enemies, and bodies of water/bottomless pits that you need to clear.  At several points during the level, you’ll switch to another character to help further your progress towards the overall goal.  Controls are still tight and responsive, it’s still easy to gauge how hard and how far you need to hit that jump button, and if you screw up it is, more often than not, your fault rather than the game’s.

Level designs are still nice and varied, the two demo levels take place in a jungle and a factory, which are complimented by the bright, charming, stylish art design.  There’s still a lot of variety in the game, one moment you’re leaping across large gaps onto tiny platforms, and the next you’re in a shoot-out with a mechanised demon-monster.  The writing is still strong and funny; the cast of characters that populate the franchise holding onto their crown as my favourite cast in any platform series ever.

Mind, the game could suck horribly and I still wouldn’t care.  I’d just be happy to spend time with these characters again.

The game does try something new, though, and these are in the form of disguises/past members of Sly’s family.  Once equipped, these give you new abilities to use.  An Arabian-themed costume during the first demo level gave me the ability to slow down time; primarily for getting through fast closing thief doors.  The second demo level gave me access to Sly’s medieval knight ancestor (for reasons only known to me and thanks to the stall I was playing on having no sound, I imagined him sounding like Numbuh 1 from Codename: Kids Next Door) who had the ability to slingshot himself upwards at high speeds; primarily for navigating the machine the level is based around.

I’m being rather cold and clinical with my analysis of Sly Cooper: Thieves In Time, and that’s rather intentional.  You see, I liked it.  I really liked it.  But I liked it for the exact same reasons that I liked the Sly trilogy from the PS2.  This new Sly is so much like the old Slys that you could swear that it was ripped straight from 2005.  That, again, means that I enjoyed it and am looking forward intently to its release early next year.  But it also means that I have very little to say about it, really.

If you liked any of the previous Sly Cooper games, you’ll like this one.  If you didn’t, you won’t.  And if you have no idea as to what the Sly Cooper games are, buy The Sly Collection, and however you feel about that will be your exact feelings towards Thieves In Time.  For better or worse.

Tales From The Show Floor: Eurogamer Expo Part II

Callum Petch

On September the 29th of 2012, a wannabe games journalist named Callum Petch made a three-hour trip down to London, England to attend the Eurogamer Expo — the UK’s premier videogame… err… expo. His mission? To preview as many games as humanly possible in one day. These are his stories…

Being a spectator gamer can be a nightmare.  You witness the fudge-fingered gamer continue to make the same asinine, amateur mistakes over and over and over again.  You get to see them repeatedly run around the same square foot of level trying to figure out where to go on the clearly signposted environment.  You view them repeatedly forgetting basic gameplay controls.  It’s pretty much torture to sit through and it takes every single fibre of your being not to go up to them and actively wrestle the controller away from them.

I was a victim of being a spectator gamer whilst waiting to get my hands on Sly Cooper: Thieves In Time (a preview of which will be ready soon).  Initially, this was one of the quieter booths at the Expo; being tucked away in some random dark corner of the show floor with the latest in the seemingly undying Ratchet & Clank franchise will do that to you; but that meant that, by the time I got around to the stall, there was no line.  Just the two people playing, a seven year-old girl, with her mother watching, and a mid-30’s mother (who looked a less ugly version of The Human Thumb from Here Comes Honey Boo-Boo…  lay off, I watch The Soup) with her eight-year old son (at a guess) watching her.  I figured that they’d be done soon enough and stood in line waiting to play.

And so began the third longest wait of the entire Expo (behind “waiting to play Fable: The Journey” and “waiting for Fable: The Journey to end”).

The girl didn’t really know how to play.  She knew that she needed to jump onto the tiny platform but didn’t know that she needed to press Circle in order to actually land on the platform (Sly’s super sneaky stealth moves and such).  Initially, I let her off, in my mind, because the demo doesn’t even attempt to explain its control scheme outside of a brief glimpse on the load screen.  But then she kept trying, and kept trying, and kept trying.  Again, to be fair, she never got angry at the game or made weird, horrifying noises at her continued failure, but it did become hard to watch so I switched my view over to the woman’s game, which looked nearly completed.

This was a big mistake.

The resulting mess was way more embarrassing than this Just Dance 3 promotional image.

The woman’s game was up to the boss fight of the last level.  “Brilliant!” I thought.  “This won’t take long at all!  Soon I’ll finally be able to play the new Sly game that I didn’t realise that I’m so excited for!”  The boss fight is piss easy if you have ever played a platform game.  It performs highly telegraphed, easily dodged attacks in patterns before exposing its weak points for you to hit endlessly.  Eventually, you hit the boss so much that it dies.  Simple stuff.

Unless you’re this woman.  You see, despite trying upwards of 45 times (I counted), this woman never seemed to memorise the attacks.  She would always get hit by them, all of the time, on every single attempt.  She never seemed to notice the weak point until it had retracted itself, all of the time, on every single attempt.  And, absolute worst of all, she never seemed to grasp the concept of aiming and moving at the same time.  The thought never occurred to her, so every single time that the weak point was exposed, she had to stand directly in the middle of the boss’ attack because she never realised that you can still get a shot in whilst avoiding his attack.

This lead to an endless cycle of her starting the boss fight, getting hit by a standard attack, getting hit by missiles because she stood still shooting rather than moving and shooting, getting set on fire because she stood right in the line of the flames rather than moving elsewhere and shooting from a better angle, dying, cursing, and starting again.  And she never gave up!  Even when her son was insisting that they move on so that he could leave with some semblance of self-respect intact, she was adamant that they were staying until she’d completed it successfully.

I can’t think of or find any other relevant pics, so here is an image from Gravity Falls.

Eventually, a giant queue developed behind the pair of not-particularly-good players and just as many spectators.  Others were staring, dumbfounded at the display, especially of the woman’s continued sweary mission of vengeance, right there with me.  I brought others up to speed with the simple message of “It’s been like this for 20 minutes.”  I felt my soul slipping away, but I was fortunate enough that a couple of other people felt like chatting with me whilst we waited.

And would you like to know the capper to this whole ordeal?  The little girl, who was a full level and a half behind the woman on the boss battle when I turned up?  She actually finished first!  I’m not kidding.  By the time that she got to the second level, she actually had a good grasp on pretty much everything to do with the game, even concepts that had been introduced into the series for the first time in that level.  She blazed through the boss battle on her first try and finally left the stall; happy and loving the game and leaving it free for me to have a go.

As for the woman?  Another 20-odd minutes later (read: by the time that I got to the halfway point of the second level), she too finally finished and left the stall with her son in tow apparently none the wiser to the agonising display that she had put the entire stall through.  It’s literally the most torturous experience of spectator gaming that I have ever been a part of and I don’t think that it’ll be matched any time soon.