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.