Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time

Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time brought back the master thief of the Cooper clan after a long break, and it arrived on PlayStation Vita alongside the PlayStation 3 version. The plot hinges on pages vanishing from the family book Thievius Raccoonus — someone in the past is rewriting the history of the entire Cooper line, so the old gang sets out to travel through time to feudal Japan, the wild west, medieval England, and even the ice age. Each episode has its own setting, its own villain, and its own forgotten Cooper ancestor who needs to be tracked down.

The gameplay stayed faithful to the original trilogy: sneaking along ledges and ropes, silently pickpocketing guards, switching between the three main characters, and missions that flow from freely explorable districts into a big heist at the end of each chapter. Sanzaru Games added costumes that change abilities — one lets you play a lute and summon allies, another lets you fly through the air or move through fire. This makes the structure more varied, though at the cost of occasional dead spots where the game sets its core thieving discipline aside. There are also minigames, in which Bentley hacks into security systems in the form of a retro arcade shooter, while Murray solves things with brute force.

The Vita version kept the cartoonish look with bold outlines and smooth motion, just with lower resolution and less detailed backgrounds than on the home console; it also supported cross-platform save transfers and touch inputs in several minigames. The music is playful, with jazz and ethnic motifs matching each era, and the voice acting still has the charm of classic animated series. Contemporary reviews received the title kindly as a decent comeback that nonetheless didn't surpass the second entry. Today it's the series' final chapter, and on Vita its mission-based structure makes it ideal for short play sessions. There are also plenty of collectibles, from bottles that unlock each episode's vault to masks, so anyone wanting to see everything will spend considerably more time in the game.