this is a tedious, often infuriating experience with an appreciated art style and inconsistent spikes of good humour.

everything in the game is 2-3x longer than it should be; interesting and varied objectives aren’t interesting or varied when you’re asked to complete them three times in a row with little differentiating the first from the last - all the while the camera is unhelpful at best, the platforming is inconsistent, the combat is mostly lazy. the environments that you explore each chapter seem to be created by a team saying “this is a well designed and attractive area, how do we make it an absolute living nightmare to traverse?”. the cutscenes and dialogue are mostly exposition dumps and some of the mission objectives are wildly unclear.

this sounds overly negative, and it is, but only because there is a VERY good sequel in an easily trimmed down version of the content that is here. the first game is a fun and tight 6-7 hour experience, this is at least 15 hours and feels like the longest game ever made when you can see the progress % going up by a single percent after each mission - I was questioning things at 25%, bored by 50% and almost shelved it at 75%. this is a bloated misstep and killed any interest in me playing Sly 3.