Sometimes I like to replay the whole series to remember how good they were and then remember how thoroughly this one killed the franchise outright.

These dudes were so fucking lazy that they just allow you to make a shit ton of money in level 1 and just always have a high ass stockpile to always buy upgrades that you'll never really use. Every treasure that you find on the map is rarely over 150 coins yet just pick pocketing guards will have a 2/3 chance to net you a 200 or 500 coin worth item, completely negating the point of bringing treasures back. And for some reason ALL OF THEM ARE TIMED but not because they're booby trapped or something realistic like that. They just are and they vanish instead of blowing up if you aren't fast enough to get back to the hideout.

I'm probably the only person irked by this specific change but I really hate that if you jump from a high spot you will now have a hard landing animation on Sly when his whole schtick is being nimble and light on his feet, and makes movement just a little worse. Speaking of movement this game has the most innacurate system for environment interaction out of the entire franchise. You'll try to land or latch onto something and regularly you'll be flung to something off screen or the animation will just give up and you have to reclimb something or fall into a pit, or with the spire jump if you jump off too quickly the game will give you this short hop that will just fling you into pits. I didn't know I was playing every Assassin's Creed.

I ain't usually easily offended but as a black man myself The Grizz is a fucking wild ass character that for all intents and purposes should not have been allowed to exist. That is just out and out no debate a racist caricature of a black person. Like not even Tsao and Mz. Ruby were this bad.

This game overall is just a case study in character assassination but anybody who knows anything about this game has heard this insanely valid criticism ad nauseum so I'm not gonna repeat it.

Your existence.
Is God's failure.

This game FUCKS, YOU'RE ALL WRONG

One of the best gameplay formulas in gaming history JACKED UP by the power of next gen, the SPRAWLING level designs are PACKED with creative platforming sequences and secret areas. LEAPING ACROSS T-REX FOSSILS BEFORE PARAGLIDING THROUGH SNAKING CAVE SYSTEMS. HOPPING ACROSS ROCKS GLISTENING IN THE GUSHING RAVINES OF FEUDAL JAPAN'S GRAND CHASMS. SLIDING ACROSS TRAIN TRACKS AS A 19TH CENTURY LOCOMOTIVE SWERVES AROUND THE CORNER BEHIND YOU. The scope is HUGE, who the FUCK told you this game was bad LET'S FUCKING GO

Enhanced by the ancestors and costumes. The worst thing about the Sly series is that it has INCREDIBLE platforming and CAPTIVATING characters... surrounded by the most dogshit minigame compilation you've ever seen. This game IMPROVES that, with much of the variety now stemming from these.

They keep the same core gameplay as Sly but with enough tweaks and changes to offer unique challenges; third person shooting, 2D platformer segments, some of Sly's moves but with different physics. They're EXTENSIONS of the core movement-focused gameplay rather than DISTRACTIONS FROM it, FUCKING fire... so anyway here's MOTION CONTROLS AAAAARRRRRGGGGGHHHHH

YA BLEW IT, WHAT THE FUCK. Control the most jacked caveman ever fossiled but UH OH, this loggy woggy is HEAVY WEVVY, to lift it tilt the controller left WEEEEE tilt the controller right WEEEEE tilt the controller le- EAT SHIT. Zonks, this door is sealed shut, guess it can only be fixed by TILTING A BALL THROUGH A MAZE, DON'T FALL OFF THE EDGES HAHA ROLLY POLY DOOPSY POOPSY. Shake Carmelita's ass. I'm serious, IN THIS GAME FOR 7 YEAR OLDS THERE'S A SEQUENCE WHERE CARMELITA GIVES A LAP DANCE, SHAKE THE CONTROLLER TO SHAKE HER ASSHOLE. "Mummy, what's that on my PS Vita screen?" "Oh nothing Eduardo, it's just LABIA"

The writing, WHAT THE FUCK WHY. This suave, quick witted rogue is now a BELLEND, moping whenever the girlfriend he lied to calls him out on his bullshit then busting out the corniest puns I've heard since my racist uncle was exiled from the family. MURRAY. LOUD. ALL THE TIME. HE'S LOUD LAUGH COME ON. PENELOPE, what the FUCK. Turning this SWEETHEART of a bb grill into EVIL BECAUSE MONEY.

"B-but she was Black Baron, Black Baron evil she was a bitch" YEAH because she was 1) alone in the world and 2) was fighting for survival, she had to use every trick she could. NOW SHE'S GETTING DICKED DAILY SURROUNDED BY PILES OF GOLD, BULLSHIT ASS

Overall though, the game SLAPS eat my SixAxis controlled ass

I owe the original Sly Cooper trilogy a revisit, but I expect a ton of it will hold up super well. Fun, silly, creative, often mature, thematically rich, mechanically satisfying... very much one of the all-time great gaming trilogies. And by pure consequence of creation, Sucker Punch Productions coming out of nowhere to out-do Naughty Dog and Insomniac at their own "3D Platformer Mascot" game.

I mention all this because I do not hold the same enthusiasm for Thieves in Time. Sanzaru had a solid core here, taking the Sly 2/Sly 3 formula and rolling out a couple new worlds/characters to play with. If the series was to continue, the Cooper ancestors were a good avenue to explore. The first three chapters are all pretty solid. But...

Well, so, Sly 3 had such a strong, perfect ending to the series that at least one thing needed to be undone to justify this game's existence. Thieves in Time undoes two things. The first of these - pull Sly out of retirement - was necessary. The second of these, which gets spelled out at the end of Episode 4...

...well, there's a reason I put the game down for half a decade. I am rarely someone who pretends works of media don't exist, but I legitimately try to forget about Thieves in Time entirely because of how much that twist pisses me off. You can make an argument that that moment makes a certain character more interesting, but I dunno. Just feels like it was done to reset status quo more than anything.

Things sorta feel a little off in general, largely indicative of a different director/creative team. Sly this time around sounds a little more ironic and a little less soft-spoken in his narration. Dimitri's personality has been all but sand-blasted away. Most of the new characters look all right, but Le Paradox does not at all fit the series' general aesthetic. The game is back down to five chapters, the same as the first game, yet it feels like a lot more could be done here. The Cooper Ancestors we get are all fun, as are the environments, but I feel like one more would have rounded things out nicely (and staved off the cliffhanger ending).

Actually, supposedly, there was a whole 'nother level planned, but it was scrapped so the game could be released on Vita. ...that kinda sucks.

Oh! I forgot about this game's costume system. Some legitimately top notch animation on those. Sly pompously strutting around in samurai armor or crawling around in sabertooth tiger-skin is great stuff.

Thieves in Time is mostly there. Sadly, I feel like the places where it doesn't hold up are the most sensitive things that could have been botched. Sanzaru made a pretty decent effort, but all they managed to accomplish was to ruin Sucker Punch's precariously-balanced house of cards. Too bad.

It makes me sad that this is Sly's swan song after Sly 3 ended so perfectly. The story and characters in Thieves in Time are silly and childish. The characters feel like bad parodies of themselves, and I can't take any of the villains seriously. The Cooper ancestors don't really add anything to the story.

I could possibly forgive this game a little if it was at least as fun as the original trilogy, but everything has been copied in a way that's just slightly off. The characters feel weirdly heavy to move around and the double jump isn't as snappy. The game still consists of a series of missions in a small map that lead to the big heist, but these missions are painfully linear and handholdy, and the costumes mechanic is horribly slow and clunky to use. The Cooper ancestors are all just Sly with one extra ability that doesn't make any meaningful difference to gameplay and only has a use where it's required to progress in missions. On top of all of this, the load times are extremely long and the framerate is inconsistent, making the game feel a lot less smooth than the trilogy.

I really tried to enjoy this game for what it was and form an opinion separate from the popular fan consensus, but even ignoring the bad story, it was rarely fun. There were some good missions but they were few and far between. It seems the new dev team didn't quite get what made Sly good.

as a big sly fan since childhood i think this is the most disappointing game ever for me, but even so it still has a few positives

the presentation (i especially love the health bars in this game so much and the animations, both cutscenes and actual ingame animations) and content (buncha collectibles) are at their highest in this game, but then on the other hand the jobs are pretty boring, theres a fuckton of hacking minigames for some reason and the upgrades other than the few classics like paraglide and silent obliteration are so whatever, not to mention the gameplay wasnt as snappy as the other 3 games, everything is so floaty and awful to control, you just slip off of things constantly in a stealth platformer like wtf, how do you go and make a sly game then make it laggy, floaty and with annoying input delay.

since the gimmick is time travel the worlds are pretty diverse and interesting, i really liked the selection they went with, but then the level design is forgettable and nothing to write home about which is such a shame

the cooper ancestors are very colorful and endearing characters (tennessee kid my beloved) but then my biggest gripe comes in, the way they wrote the old characters was a huge step backwards, the development that theyve built for 3 games was just gone for almost every single returning character (dimitri was still good old dimitri). also playing the ancestors feels worse than playing sly because his upgrades dont transfer over to them.

all in all this game is still worth checking out if u like sly imo, you can tell the devs REALLY tried making a good game and not a cashgrab, but dont go in with the highest of hopes. (edit: forgot to mention this game has one of the worst final boss fights in maybe all of gaming)