Sly Cooper returns! Everyone’s favourite kleptomaniac raccoon is finally here on PS5, albeit in port form rather than in a brand new title. Still, we’ll take what we can get when it comes to Sly, and so it’s a pleasure to see the first game in the series, Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus, as a PS2 Classic, available for a reasonable price on the PS Store or to download as a part of the PS Plus Premium subscription service.
Originally released in 2002, Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus introduces us to the character of Sly, the last in a long line of master thieves. He was due to be handed the book containing all the secrets of thievery, but then a gang of rotters called the Fiendish Five stole the book and murdered his parents in cold blood.
Ten years later, he’s still a pretty good thief even without the book of pilfering secrets, and he’s teamed up with a couple of buddies from college to go on thief adventures. But he remains pretty raw about the whole Fiendish Five thing, and so he dons his cute little stealin’ hat, grabs his stick that he beats people to death with, and sets off to reclaim his stolen property and get a little revenge along the way.
Aside from the whole murder and revenge thing this is Saturday morning cartoon stuff and that’s absolutely fine. The story of Sly Cooper and the Theivius Raccoonus is charming enough to give you a little narrative justification for what you’re doing, but relatively unobtrusive and not something you need to think too deeply about. We’re here for the simple but entirely enjoyable platforming action, and even twenty years later, the title delivers on that front.
Sly is definitely more in camp Spyro than camp Crash Bandicoot in that the platforming challenges here are relatively forgiving and the game is more about exploring each level and collecting the requisite number of clues to proceed. Enemies usually only have one attack pattern and are quite easily dealt with. Sly dies in a single hit but checkpoints are pretty frequent, and if you collect enough coins then you get a magic horseshoe which allows you to survive a fatal blow and continue unabated.
The game is broken up into hub worlds, each dedicated to a member of the Fiendish Five that you’ll have to foil. Each of these hub worlds branches off into numerous other levels in which you’ll have to complete certain tasks, and once you’ve done that in all of these levels you can proceed in the main hub world, defeat the boss, and reclaim a portion of your stolen book. All told, as long you’re fairly decent at platforming games you can see the whole thing off in less than ten hours.
Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus is still a fun time even in its advanced age, but there are some things you need to be wary of. Most egregious ate the camera controls, which by default are set to inverted when moving the camera horizontally and there’s no way to change them in-game. We found this impossible to get used to, and kept moving the camera in the wrong direction, resulting in multiple unwarranted deaths.
Fortunately, the PS5’s PS2 emulation software has a couple of tricks up its sleeve to help with this. Tapping Options and then going into the Settings allows you to remap all buttons, including directional inputs from the analogue sticks, and so you can brute force the camera controls to suit your needs. And of course, any deaths — unwarranted or otherwise — can also be dealt with using the helpful rewind feature that comes as standard with every PS2 revival.
Another interesting wrinkle to consider is that this game has actually already been ported — along with Sly 2 and 3 — to PS3 in 2010. If you’ve still got a PS3 hooked up, or you can make decent use of PS Plus Premium’s game streaming service, then that version might be preferable to you over this one. The PS3 version of the game runs at a higher resolution and controls a little more nicely in our opinion, but this version has the rewind features, and doesn’t involve turning your PS3 on and waiting a month for the updates to finish installing.
In the end there’s not really a definitive answer as to the best way to play Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus, but having played the original game on PS2, the remaster on PS3, and now this port on PS5, we can say that you’ll probably have a pretty good time whichever option you go for. Oh, and if you’re a Trophy hunter, both the PS3 version and this one have a Platinum, and they’ve both got different lists with different requirements, too.
Conclusion
Sucker Punch may have moved on to the incredibly popular Ghost of Tsushima, but we’re still hoping that ol’ Sly will get the opportunity to come out of retirement for one last job at some point. Until then, there are worse ways to spend a Sunday afternoon than running, jumping, and stealing your way through Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus, which remains entirely playable and enjoyable two decades on from its original release.