Why Thieves in Time Was a Massive Disappointment

Sorry for the long wait guys. But we are finally back with Sly Cooper Thieves In Time! The most recent entry in the Sly Cooper series and trust me I know the video is long, but this is a video I have wanted to make for YEARS, and hey good news is that people I know in real life don't have to hear me rant on it!

[BgXERO]

This being compared to a fan fiction piece makes sense. There was no sense of weight placed upon the difficulty of time travel. That was a big thing for me.

[jasonsmith]

27:00 I love how little sense this scene makes.

Sly 1: Sly attempts to send Clockwork into a bubbling lava pool, killing him.

Sly 2: Sly delivers the final blow killing Neyla and Clockwork together. Sly can throw flightless birds off of an airship plummeting to their deaths. Sly complies with a plan involving Murray throwing a bunch of night club security into a water tank until their drowned/suffocated corpses cause the machine to rupture. Sly desecrates gravestone. Starting from this game, Sly can purchase and find items to let him quickly electrocute guards to death for quick kills.

Sly 3: Sly raises no objection to Bentley kidnapping an opera worker for use in training or blatantly murdering him afterwards. Sly raises no objections to watching Bentley send a pirate into shark-infested waters to be killed. Sly personally kills two pirates to steal parts of a disguise. Sly raises no objection to Murray throwing a bunch of profiteering miners into the maw of a hungry alligator. Sly asks the Panda King to help destroy an army of Jiang Shi (hopping zombies). The Cooper Gang kill numerous profiteering miners in a bar fight. Sly can still purchase items from the black market to easily kill people. Sly murders a Chinese guard who just wants his photo taken.

Sly 4: Sly spares the villain because killing is wrong, and the villain doesn't _need_ to die.

*I see no problem here.*

[Postie]

The absolut deal breaker for me in this game was really the thing with Penelope. I dont mind people turning bad, just make that it makes sense. D;

[KnucklestheEcidna]

Due to limited memory capacity on the VITA the Final chapter which was the episode in Ancient Egypte. got CUT OUT because of it.

[Celestn]

"This game is a bad fanfiction" Oh my god, this makes so much sense.

[jungledyret]

My biggest problem with Sly 4 was that slight change in Sly's personality. I know it is not a big thing, but in my opinion he was much more professional and mature in previous games.

You can see this in his behavior towards Carmelita. It is understantable that he had this playful attitude towards her in previous games, when their relationship was short and garbled. It was like a game that they both liked to play. But when their relationship became official, I just rolled my eyes when I saw the way Sly acted when he got busted in the start of the Thieves in Time.

Maybe they wanted to make his character little more relatable for children, but then again the whole game is exploring adult themes in that borderline manner no less than the other three games, so why tune his character to be more childlike in this game?

[crash]

I'm an aspiring game developer and I look really deep into the games I play and often write down small elements that I find captivating.
Sly holds first place for the number of interesting elements I have written down in my notepad.

The atmosphere in the first games are so memorable: the textures are close to water paintings, the artstyle is straight out of a comic book and the music often has a "night-in-paris" like feel to it. I mean these games are art!

The hub world in 2 and 3 have those interesting "you're not welcome here" atmosphere to them and the only people you see on the streets are guards that have taken over a seemingly pieceful town... that's so unique!

Now look at the 4th game... there is nothing interesting to be said. They got rid of every aspect that made me LOVE the sly games so it definitely doesn't come as a surprise why the 4th one doesn't exist to me.

[billiamafton]

Why couldn't they make the villains in the past time periods be Le Paradox's ancestors. That would've been an interesting parallel between Sly and Le Paradox with how their ancestors acted, one honorable family of thieves and the other not honorable. They could've even had the two generations fight each other at the end of the game.

[TylireousGaming]

In my opinion, Sly 4 is non canonical.
That's what I'll choose to believe.

[Debatra.]

One thing about the Sly/Carmelita subplot that's always bugged me to no end is that, while Carmelita has every right to be mad at Sly for faking amnesia, nobody even mentions that she barely hesitated to take advantage of it by lying to him about who he was.

[jsamue]

Sly 2 WOULD have been the best game, if you could replay any of the levels without starting a new game :/

[TheGhostWriterGirl]

A good plot twist isn't good because you didn't see it coming. It's good because you SHOULD have seen it coming. Thieves in Time completely misses this.

[Xanman]

To sum up this game: "I'm not angry, I'm just disappointed."

[RegretfulDeadMan]

"This will be the first and last time I make a video on this game"
If only you knew

[melrakan]

I'd love a Sly 3 sequel that is basically about Interpol's corruption. Sly and Carmelita set out to catch criminals together... by stealing from them. The Cooper Clan's legacy continues roughly adjacent to the law rather than against it.

[QRaven]

I have no idea, but something about this game just didn't FEEL like a sly game. It was missing something, and I think it's the characters and how dead they felt was the problem. I didn't care for the Ancestors at all they felt bland. The gang felt boring, and I love Carmelita but I hate what they did with her design ( trying to make her more " sexy") and she didn't even do much . Also I would have loved to see the female Ancestors ( I remember a pirate one) instead of Bob... I hated him the most.The story was totally a bad fanfic. The Villains....omfg the villains we're soooo forgettable.Penelope being evil was meh. I didn't know what to think about it.Gameplay was good, felt good, but wasn't anything different from the last game.This whole game just felt empty and dragged on. I would love to see more games this is my fav series. Though I hope they bring more to the game.

[danganronper]

A plot twist that I was expecting to come from this game (before it's release) is the main villain being one of Sly's ancestors or descendants.
Still got hopes for it in Sly 5

[lugbzurg]

One thing that really bugged me was that they removed the "mission tags" and replaced them with a generic minimap.

I always loved how the second and third games put those icons way up in the sky with arrows pointing all the way down to their exact location INSTEAD of using a minimap. This encourages the player to focus on the entire hub world itself and take more of the level in. Forcing the player to rely on a minimap instead makes you stuck staring at a corner of the screen.

Plus, I also really didn't like how linear it was. In the previous games, you'd usually have around 3-5 objectives available at the same time that you could tackle in whatever order you chose, and when you finished those, then there'd be around another 3-5 objectives to go through. However, in this game, virtually every time, it's just one objective that you have to follow in order. A couple times, you have two objectives given to you at once, but about 99%, it's just one at a time. Never liked that.

[tastiger]

Lol, "movie", it was fun when we thought that was gonna happen...

[xXYannuschXx]

They should have focused on Clockwerk's origin in Sly 4, I mean, where did he come from? He is over a thousand years old and already had his android body in a time, where it would be absolutely impossible to create. It was never explained how he managed to survive all this time apart from his comment "Hatred is the main ingredient in the fountain of youth".

IMO: Sanzaru did try to make a good Sly game, Sly 4 isn't completely horrible. The problem is the bad fanfiction level story and the short and un-original gameplay. I have to give them credit though for recreating the movement-physics from the PS2 titles (they actually used most of the original PS2 code to do so!), it really felt like playing a PS2 game. Also, the animation quality was top notch, everything looks so smooth and realistic (the PS2 titles were pretty wonky in that regard); compare that to the recent R&C title: the animation quality during gameplay is okay, but absolutely terrific during cutscenes, they didn't even bother to TRY to make good facial animations.