One of my top 3 favorite games of all time, yup I love it that much. While the first game in the series was a fine game all its own this one was for many reasons a huge improvement over it. First off you don't just play as Sly this time around, you also get the option to control Bentley and Murray. The three gang members have so much chemistry and really feel like they've truly been best friends for their entire lives, what's also great is that each one controls very differently and provides a very unique experience as you go through the game. As Sly your main object is to be stealthy and pull off jobs that usually involve things like climbing and platforming, pick-pocketing, so on and so forth. Bentley being the brainy one of the gang as well as their demolitions expert does a lot of sabotaging and demolition jobs, as well as jobs that require more intellect and technological knowledge, like the hacking missions. Finally, Murray is the strong-man of the group and most of his jobs usually involve lots of heavy lifting, taking out multiple enemies, and sometimes just pure destruction. There's also plenty of vehicle missions that give the game plenty of variety in each level. Speaking of levels, each level is fairly "Open" to exploration although this wouldn't be considered an open world game, you can do each mission on your own time and do them in whatever order you want which is something I've always respected in games, boss fights also offer a nice bit of variety as well so there's plenty to like here.

Now as for the story, this picks up 2 years after the last game ended where Sly got revenge on the gang that took out his parents and learned the ways of a thief by reading the Thievious Raccoonus, this included his family's arch rival, a giant metallic Owl named Clockwork. Although Clockwork was defeated at the end of the last game, he has not been totally disposed of as his body parts must be found and destroyed as well so that he can never again return, the parts however have been stolen by another group known as "The Klaww gang" who each took their own pieces of Clockworks body in order to run their own criminal operations, without getting too much into the plot of the games I will say that the main villains are all fairly interesting on their own and that things don't always go to plan throughout the game, again not gonna spoil anything but there's a few parts that caught me completely off guard when I first experienced them growing up and to this day I think this game might have the best written story of any platforming series out there.

Sly 2 is my favorite game of all time. I'll try a bit to explain why.

The characters are so much fun. Sly, Bentley and Murray are endlessly entertaining. "Band of thieves" is a perfect title as you really feel a sense of camaraderie.
The marketing behind this game pushed the idea that you, the player, were a member of the team; a sort of intangible omnipotent puppetmaster that guided the cooper gang. Given how much you come to love them, they really achieved this feeling of making the player feel like apart of the gang.

The pacing in this game is just godly. The game perfectly built tension and allowed for rest periods throughout the story. The episode and missions structure is perfect and the storytelling in this game is honestly slept on.

I could go on, covering things like the game's gorgeous aesthetics and colour choice that are beautiful to this day, but in short, Sly 2 is simply perfect to me. I replay it every other year and I fall in love all over again.