In recent months I've decided to go back to some older games I've played and reevaluate them to see if my opinion has changed on them at all, this game was one of them I wanted to return to the most, it was mostly out of morbid curiosity but I feel like to better understand where I'm coming from I need to give some background. I don’t usually like writing down these long form reviews since I’ve always preferred condensing my thoughts down to more bite sized reviews for the sake of convenience; but for this I have so much I wanna say about this game so please indulge me on this.

Sly Cooper is not just one of my favorite series of games, I have a very personal connection to me. Growing up I didn't really have many friends mostly due to the constant moving back and forth to different houses because of a really messy divorce, because of that and my young self had very bad and unchecked anxiety I never really made that many long-lasting friends and mostly just went through the motions of life just having other people tell me what to do.
It wasn't until my father gave me his hand me down fat PS2 where I first fell in love with video games, which most of them were crappy licensed game because I was a stupid kid who didn’t know any better so most of my youngest video game memories is playing Nicktoons Battle for Volcano Island, Looney Tunes Acme Arsenal, or Snoopy and The Red Baron (Right around the time Hollywood video was going under they were selling off stock and since my dad worked their at the time he grabbed that game for me since I played it nearly 24/7, so I still have that game with the old Hollywood video; if I could show you it in this written review I’d do it but alas, words.). I did have some pretty good bangers of licensed games like Spider-man 2 or Simpsons Hit and Run (somehow I got that????) but at that point in gaming I was only interested in playing shit like Looney Tunes: Back in Action Movie game or Fairly Oddparents: Breakin Da Rules. That was until one day as a reward for doing good at school (and to stick it to my father) my mother brought me to our local Toys R Us where I could pick out 1 toy. I combed those aisle like I was like an archaeologist. I so rarely got the chance to go to Toys R Us and I was gonna make damn well sure that I found the perfect toy. I was gonna go with a classic pick for a 5 year old that being a Lego Star Wars set. I had picked it out perfectly and then my mom looked at the price and told me to find something cheaper, slightly defected, I then went back over to the games scention and looked in the one place I hadn't checked before 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙘𝙡𝙚𝙖𝙧𝙖𝙣𝙘𝙚 𝙖𝙞𝙨𝙡𝙚. The PS3 was coming out in a few months unbenounced to my dumb 5 year old brain who still thought the PS2 was the coolest thing ever and didn’t even question why so many PS2 games were lying in the bargain bin. So a lot of games on the PS2 had gotten their Greatest Hits versions out, and there in that aisle I saw a game that would basically be my comfort game and my true gateway into gaming, God of War. My mom and no I got Sly 3: Honor Amongst Thieves instead.

When I brought that game home I wasn’t as enthusiastic (mostly because I wanted the much cooler looking game with the guy holding swords), but after a few hours playing the game I had almost immediately gotten hooked. The charming cast of characters, the fun yet somewhat challenging platforming and stealth system, the colorful worlds to explore. This game for all intents and purposes my true entry into gaming. I couldn’t get enough of the characters and their relationship with one another, for a good LONG time Sly and the Gang were like a group of friends I wish I had found years earlier. Yeah I played the third game first and I never really understood the underlining theme of the game but I didn’t care all that much, over the course of years I would seek out the other 2 Sly games and consume as much Sly Cooper related media as I could find. I was so into Sly Cooper that eventually my grandmothertold me that “The ToothFairy” might bring you something Sly Cooper related, that night my brain was fucking melting with anticipation for what I had thought was the secret never before heard of Sly Cooper 4. Instead “The Tooth Fairy” had just left me a copy of Shadow The Hedgehog instead. (I was never the same since) So in my mind a Sly Cooper 4 was my Mody Dick of games, my green light at the end of the dock so to say; a game that I would kill for if given the chance to play it.
So Imagine this (and I’ll never forget this day). It was a coldish January Saturday morning at my mom’s old rundown apartment I was living in. I had gotten my cereal and when to sit down on the cold wooden floor to watch some Cartoon Network, it was around the time they had their saturday morning DC block of show so after the only show I cared about ended (Green Lantern the Animated series) I got up and went to do some homework. Then to my complete utter shock there I saw it, plane as day; a commercial for Sly Cooper 4, and it was coming out in a few weeks I had such a panic attack I nearly dropped the bowl I had in my hand, because quite frankly I never thought I’d see the day where my favorite series would never get a continuation. The only problem I noticed was that it wasn’t gonna be on the PS2; only PS3. At that point in time the only systems I had were my dad’s old busted up fat PS2 and a Wii; I begged my mom for one but she never budged on it. I eventually did get a new gaming system for christmas, but it was a Wii U; so you know how that went.

For years I had been looking for a time when I could play Sly Cooper 4 but that time never came. I never really kept track of the game, I didn’t really know how to use the internet that well so online review scores and other people's opinions of the game passed me by. Weeks turned into months which turned into years and eventually the game just left my mind. I had high school work to deal with and other more important stuff a teenager would need to deal with. For all intents and purposes I was growing up, and I didn't really need Sly and the gang to keep me company anymore, I had made new friends and played other games series I was much more interested in, stupid dumb teenage STRM really didn’t care all that much for games as a form of artistic entertainment or really anything other then something to keep their hands busy, that was until sometimes around mid 2017. I was helping my uncle clean out his basement and down their I had found what is essentially bury treasure; my dad’s old fat PS2 and a handful of games from my original childhood collection; most of my childhood collection had been lost due to the constant moving and my mother just up and leaving me one day and selling most of my shit, but there it was plain as day. I didn’t ask my Uncle if I could take the system and its game but since it was something of mine I didn’t think he’d mind (like I said Teenage STRM was an asshole). To my complete and utter shock that fat PS2 still worked and was completely functional, it sounded like a jet engine due to the nearly 16 years worth of dust built up inside of it but it still worked and that’s really all I cared about. The first game I put in on a replay was Sly 3, and on god I was like the snoopy critic from Ratatouille; all those memories flooding back to me, the muscle memory kicking in, the writing being clever and funny as hell, I had recovered my real love for the medium of gaming and falling back in love with the Sly series.

After neglecting my high school work I had finally decided to find a REAL way to play Sly Cooper 4, at this point I was able to actually look up stuff on the game and what I saw looked outstanding. Fully animated cutscenes not hundred by stiff models, lusciously gorgeous maps to explore, a time travel plot that made it feel like a true sequel. So I went right to the PS3 emulator which was very janky at the time and barely worked; but I was determined to play this god damn game. I felt like I was on cloud 9 when I finally got it working and saw that amazing main menu screen. I turned it on and played it, and, and, and……I…didn’t like it. I really didn’t like it. I really really didn’t like it. In fact the further I went into the game I started to hate it, I started to REALLY hate it. Theses aren't the same cast of characters I’ve come to know and love, these aren't the same worlds I enjoyed exploring, this was NOT the same series I had come to love, and when I finished the game and saw that cliff hanger where Sly is lost in ancient egypt I nearly started to cry. This game had done something to me that most pieces of media had rarely ever managed to do, it personally pissed me off to no end.
Nearly every aspect of the game made me either annoyed or so pissed I would have a 3 minute long mental tirade on why that choice was so bad. I’m not mincing words here, I hated Sly 4 as if it killed my first born child, I hated that game more than anything else in the world. And for the next 5 years I would do nothing but constantly shit on it and berate the studio that made it, I was so fucking angry that mentialy I had labeled Sanzaru Games as my own personal LJN, a studio that in some way personally attacked me by making a game that I didn’t like. Of course nowadays I just see that as literally the most pathetic thing under the sun but teenage STRM was head strong and determined on making sure everyone knew that Sly 4 was nothing more than an unredeemable, unmitigated disaster of unimaginable proportions, and it was like this for nearly 4 years; 4 long years of being an annoying, unrelenting prick.


It’s 2023 now, I’m 21, turning 22 years old in a few months, I have credit card debt and somewhat of a social life. I’ve been trying to stop being as the kids say “Terminally Online” and while I don’t think I’m there yet I’ve made good progress and everyday is an improvement. To save money I’ve been playing through some older games I’ve had in my backlog for years, and a few days ago I looked at my PS3 games self to see if there were any games I felt like playing. There I saw it, the big yellow S and 4 looking back at me, I picked it up, looked at it and then put it back on the shelf. I sat in my computer chair thinking about Sly 4 again, something I haven't really given much thought since high school. I remember how much of an annoying turd I was towards that game and I started thinking, “was I too mean to Sly 4: Thieves in Time?”. The immediate answer should be yes since I took that game’s quality so personally that it spiraled out of control to where hating on the game became almost a personality trait, but I like to think I’m somewhat better at not only constructing my thoughts on media and I feel like it’s always best to reevaluate your opinion to keep up to date on subjects you like. So for the first time in a long time I put in Sly 4 and with an open mind replayed it to 100% completion.

This is where the actual review part comes in.
I wanna start off with my positive takes on this game because shockingly I do have nice things to say about this game now.
For starters I think from just a visual look it's pretty alright. Keeping in in the context of the past games the original series was going for a sliver age pop art comic style. It got more and more standardized as the series went along but it always kept its silver age comic roots with them. Here the style is less pop art comic and more just Saturday morning cartoon, which isn’t inherently bad per se, I may not care all that much for the overall style but it looks really nice. This was a late era PS3 game and it shows. Everything looks very clean and polished and the animations on the character are really REALLY well made. All the animations are done by hand and it pales in comparison to the original game’s animations wich all looked very stiff and reused the same animations a lot. Now granted PS2 trilogy was also on the PS2 and had a significantly smaller budget but just looking at the 2 Sly 4 has had a serious glow up, even if I don’t personally care for the overall design change.

The actual gameplay of Sly 4 is honestly not that bad. It’s a lot heavier than the PS2 games (Trust me my muscle memory would not lie), but that’s not inherently a bad thing. Being able to play as Sly’s Ancestors on paper sounds really interesting in terms of how you can mix up the general Sly Cooper gameplay; in execution it's not really all that interesting. they're all pretty much just copies of Sly’s general move set with one little extra thing added on for the sake of making each Ancestor seem unique, when in actuality there's really nothing interesting about them other than just their looks and personality. I also feel like the game has digressed in terms of just like the core characters and how they all play. In Sly 3 all of the characters not only felt different to play but they all have different types of mobility for that said character which made them not only fun to play but also fun to use in the actual open map; instead of the opposite like in Sly 2 where you could play these characters in the open world but it doesn't really feel like the world was made with their moves in mind so it mostly just kind of feels like traversing with these characters is a bit of a slog. Sly 4 mostly follows and Sly 2’s footsteps the map mostly just feels like it was made for Sly and mind and while you could play as Bentley or Murray in these Maps there is no real advantage to playing with them outside of achievement hunting or pure boredom.
Back to being positive I like that they brought back the clue bottles and treasures from Sly 2. In Sly 3 without any incentive to look for clue bottles or treasure like in the open maps of Sly 2 it mostly made a lot of the world and Sly 3 feel very empty like the maps were mostly made just for you to go to point A to point B. Here not only are the clue bottles genuinely fun to find the treasure is also a lot more fun with each treasure you find needing to be brought back to the safe house in a set amount of time rewarding the player for actually getting a good land that way you can find the best strategy to bring them back in the short time limit. There is a downside though that being the maps themselves are too big for their own good. The maps in Sly 2 were never gigantic; they were always properly self-contained to the point where trying to find all the clue bottles was not a hassle and more fun than, say, a Ubisoft open world game. Here the maps are about the size of an end game map from Sly 2, where they're really really big but nothing really helps differentiate parts of the map together, so instead of collecting clue bottles feeling like a fun reward for exploring it just feels like a slog trying to find your way around a map that feels like looks were put over form. This is a little side thing but the load tiems are genuinely awful. Their not Sonic 06 bad but their up there.

It’s finally time to get to what is possibly the most contentious aspects of the entier game, the character and writing. Going in I really wanted to say that the character writing and general story wasn’t as bad as I remembered but I was wrong, if anything I think I hate the story now more than I did before. The story is not only a bad story, it is a story that single-handedly makes the last games ending completely retroactively meaningless. I'm not going to go over the entirety of what the Sly Cooper Trilogy really meant because I this is already long enough, (If you want a well done dissection of the series I highly recommend B-Masks breakdown on all 3 games https://youtu.be/CO-OPkBwLe4), but to make the long and short of it all three Sly games represent a traditional three act narrative about the growth and change of Sly Cooper as a character along with his friends; With Sly 3 being the true climax of the whole narrative where Sly in the pursuit of the true piece of his long family legacy comes to terms with his lineage and finally starts carving out his own path not as a member of the long lineage of the Cooper family but as himself. Sly 3 is a game about being okay with endings and coming to terms with having to move on, Sly 4 is about reveling in the past and that is the nicest way I can really say about the narrative; because outside of the fact that they go back in time and they meet the Cooper ancestors there is no narrative through line at all throughout the entirety of the game. they try doing small little microarcs for each of the four main characters throughout the game but they don't actually connect with the rest of the game they just feel like many one-off arcs that don't matter outside of sly's overarching romance problems with Carmelita which feel poorly written at best and extremely out of character at worse. This brings me to how all the characters in the game are characterized they're all really really bad.They've all become very one notes in terms of just general characterization and even when they do try to give them layers they fall so flat on their face that I shit you not a goddamn Cartoon Network show from the early 2000 probably has more three-dimensional characters then Sly 4.
I feel like going over each individual character in depth because if I don't talk about this soon I'm going to fucking explode

#1 Bentley: Bentley is probably the most untarnished character in the entire game mostly because he's a very easy character to write for. He's the tech Wiz who usually stays very reserved but he's not, he's always willing to stand up for his friends and be a hero. That is the broadest I can really say about his character without going into an autistic amount of detail but for the long and short of it that is really all the depth he has in the game outside of chapter 4. (oh look at the chapter 4 all right) He's not written poorly, it pretty much just feels like he's the same character from Sly 3, which is fine but I would have preferred if they had changed him up a bit between the time Sly 3 and Sly 4 takes place.

#2 Murray: Murray's probably the character that had the most flanderization happen to him which is really disappointing because he was the one character that probably had the most character development between each entry of the PS2 era games. In the first game he was basically useless, he mostly just served the role of driving the van or getting into trouble which Sly usually had to clean up for him. well in Sly 2 he had grown in confidence and actually became a more interesting and well-round character who through sheer strangth and willpower was capable of saving his friends and get the job done.That was until the ending of Sly 2 we're Bentley gets crippled and all that confidence he gained shattered, with Murray blaming himself wholesale for what happened and leaving the group in shame. By the time we find him in Sly 3 not only did he work through his guilt for what happened to Bentley but he also gained so much more confidence outside of his pure brute strength; he became the True Heart of the team; the glue that keeps them all together and if that isn't genuinely good care to development I don't know what is. In Sly 4 Murray is pretty much just one big giant fat joke. Oh look how fat this hippo is; he eats a lot because he’s fat and hungry, that's pretty much all he is at this point. and well yeah like the fact that he is a hippo and he does eat a lot is acknowledged mostly in Sly 1, there was so much more going on under the hood that is never really acknowledged outside of chapter 3 where they try to attempt to make Murray feel useless in comparison to one of Sly's ancestors; but it's so poorly written and poorly paced it is almost laughable, and even then after chapter 3 none of the issues are ever really brought back up, it just kind of happens for a chapter and then all of his character development just kind of fucks off for the rest of the game.

#3 Carmelita: This one just makes me genuinely sad. Carmelita in the original trilogy really did fit that femme fatale dynamic that they were going for in the original trilogy where yes she in a way was made for eye candy, but she had an actual personality underneath all of that which helped her stick out even though not that character development was placed on her. In Sly 4 she's pretty much a glorified trophy. She gets kidnapped or held hostage almost every chapter, and whenever she has actually needed in the plot it's mostly just for the sake of this really poorly done romance subplot with Sly where to get back at him for lying to her she's just going to cheat on him with his Litany of ancestors they come across throughout the game.That's cocky smart demeanor that she had in the original games it's mostly gone now it's just generic banter, she's not even all that intelligent anymore they just kind of made her really dumb mostly for the sake of the poorly written romance subplot and because the general character writing in Sly 4 is not good.

#4 Sly: They turn Sly from a cool, calm, and collected master thief into basically just Sonic the Hedgehog. He never really takes any situation genuinely seriously anymore; it's mostly just snarky comebacks that are irritating and just not particularly funny, and when the game wants you to actually take his character seriously it Doesn't work because this iteration of Sly is an irredeemable douchebag who just actively doesn't care about the people around him. He's completely apathetic to the entire Carmelita romance subplot; where he gets super judgy over the fact that she's cheating on him even though he lied to her about going back into thieving.Oh yeah that's another thing that changed his character the reason he got back in thieving, at the end of Sly 3 Sly fakes amnesia after the fight with that game’s big bad Mostly to carve out his own path and to spend his life with woman he loves that being Carmelita basically giving up the entire Cooper Legacy and leaving it behind for his friends. In the beginning of Sly 4 he goes back into thieving just cause, there's no real reason given other than literally just in his own words “the old itch came back” which is quite possibly one of the shittiest ways to possibly bring your character back into the fray. The main plot of the game is literally about the main villain going back in time and erasing the entire Cooper lineage. we can talk about time travel bullshit later but as a whole you didn't really need slide to get back into thieving in order for this plot to work you could have just shown him it was happening and he would have jumped back into stop it.Just having him back into thieving not only completely ruins his sacrifice at the end of Sly 3 but it also just devalues his character.

I could genuinely go on and on about how so many reasons for the plot to happen is just from coincidences which quite frankly you learn as a bad writing tactic when you're in your High school English class. or the fact that most of the bosses in the game are completely uninteresting and so disconnected from the area in the map they're in it just kind of feels like they were slapped in there without really any thought, And the Penelope subplot my fucking god oh my god the Penelope subplot oh my god. This game story is genuinely bad and just using the defense of “it's just a kids game, why are you being so hard on a kids game” is not a good excuse because the past three Sly games have had extremely stellar writing and character development for a 3D platformer; I'm not going to stick my neck out and say the writing is as good as a Disco Elysium or Deus Ex but for the 3D mascot platformer genre they did not need to go as hard as they did for those games and because of that it just makes Sly 4 look all the more shitty in comparison.

In conclusion to this very very very long review (I’m sorry for how long it is) no I don't like Sly 4. It's good that I reevaluated it because quite frankly there are things in the game that I do like, but it's buried by just a mountain of problems that mostly stem from the fact that it's a sequel at all. After the ending of Sly 3 I desperately wanted more with these characters because these games hold such a place in my heart; but in one way or another I'm glad that we haven't gotten any more Sly Cooper, because the story is over. Not everything needs to come back with a reboot or a sequel or a sequel reboot or the all the all horrifying seboot. Sometimes just leaving a franchise to be left alone and just have its story finished is more than well enough, if we ever get more Sly Cooper I would be beyond happy but I'd rather they just have it be a remaster rather then a true sequel. I don't want them to walk back from the ending before because that's cowardice and lame, and a full-on reboot of the franchise is not a good idea either since it'd be alienating your pre-existing fan which is pretty much your core demographic. If they do bring them back it'll probably be with like a remake of the first or the whole trilogy and really I don't really want that nor do I need that I always have the original games right there on my PS3. The original Sly games were lightning in a bottle and Sly Cooper 4 proves that to me. The original writers in devs of Sucker Punch knew when to get out and when the time was right And no matter how shit Sly 4 is; we'll always have the story of Sly Cooper.