Review

Alright, we're out of the fog of childhood nostalgia and can see things for what they are. The new Sly. I came into this one with extreme trepidation. It's rather wild to resurrect a series that had laid dormant for so long and for it to be done by a different studio...Red flags, red flags. My genuine top-level review of Thieves in Time is that it was fine. It was fine. I would not say that it was good. It was not excessively bad. It was fine. Its fineness did, however, drive me pretty insane by the time I had finished it. I just really didn't enjoy myself throughout this game for a couple of reasons.

There's a patina of crud around Thieves in Time that there isn't on any of the other game. The others controlled very tightly. Thieves in Time did not. Numerous numerous times Sly would not latch onto the thing I wanted him to. It's totally possible that there was some cludginess with my PS3 in particular. As was seen on the stream there was a good amount of troubleshooting done in the beginning just to get it going. Have not read any other reviews of the game so I cannot confirm whether the crud I felt in terms of general movement was a thing with my setup, or just an aspect of the game. It just did not feel good. It wasn't like terrible or anything. But compared to extreme tight controls of the previous 3 games, it was very notable.

I think the plot is pretty garbo in this one. Can we as a society just agree that time travel is something that should never be introduced to a franchise after the fact? If it's going to come into play, it needs to be there from the very beginning. Back to the Future (1985) and Dark were the two properties that I called out while streaming as examples of that. They're explicitly about time travel. So we had a natural progression going on the series beforehand. We went from personal stakes, retrieving an item that was stolen from us. To doing heists, to doing the Big Heist. What do we do now? Well, we invent time travel and go back through the past helping your family. Making sure they don't fade out of existence and all that. Now lemme ask you somethin'. Where is the thieving? Because there was remarkably little thievery happening in this game. I started to forget that that was kind of like the whole thing we're doing. And the ancestors don't help that. None of them are doing much thievery themselves. You got knights, ninjas, cowboys, etc. etc. It was humorous in the past when we'd learn about our thief ancestors and the various moves they invented. But actually seeing them and interacting with them and not actually doing any stealing just sort of breaks the spell. It turns what was more of a silly joke into just the direct plot.

I also don't like the general humor going on. We're being very crass and using toilet humor all over. Why? I mean there was absolutely some dirty jokes in the past. But why does everything have to be fart, fart, sex in this one? Related, I don't understand who this game is for. One would assume the natural course of action when resurrecting an old property is to either A) mature with your audience. Try and tell some darker story that would appeal to the original audience without completely losing the point of the original games. Nobody wants to see Sly pick up the stripper and kill her to get his money back. Or B) do some sort of reboot. Either a full on reboot or just some soft reboot where we only tacitly refer back to previous events. The idea being that we're no longer targeting the original audience, but rather new people. Generally, kids that are the age that people who played the original games were. Thieves in Time does neither. It exists squarely as the 4th game in a series, it is not a reboot. However, it also does not grow up at all and, in fact I would say, frequently feels more immature than the original games were. It's a Dream Drop situation I fear. And so I ask, who is this game for?

Something else I hated is what the fuck is with all the repeated gameplay? We are constantly doing exactly the same minigames over and over. The hacking in particular. That was a point of pride I had for the previous games, Sly 2 Band of Thieves (2004), in particular. They almost never repeated themselves. But we're doing that all the time here.

My overall feelings of this game were quite negative, however I would just note that the experience as a whole is just fine. It really is not terrible. But there was no magic happening. The spirit had left and the body was on autopilot. Which is sad to say because one of the main things I'd say the series had going for it was it absolutely had magic. All things must end I suppose. Probably could've ended at 3.

Links

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0UgLs1BOgQM80tJjmZYVPyCC0RgB9kmm