The Sly Trilogy

What's that feeling that sets in after playing through this compilation of last-gen platformers? Worryingly, it's a feeling of freshness; The Sly Trilogy may take you back to a world that existed long before we had DLC, co-op campaigns and the endless grind of persistent XP ladders, but its range of stealthy pleasures often seem clear-headed and full of simple delights in comparison. The Sly Cooper games saw Sucker Punch at its witty and colourful best, sending a chummy gang of cartoon animals on a string of heists that stretched from Paris to Cairo and on to mysterious islands in the middle of rain-lashed oceans. It's good to finally have all that adventure in one place.

A warning, though: it can be bizarre to play Sly Cooper for the first time if your introduction to Sucker Punch was inFamous. While the PS3 open-worlder remains a stoically satisfactory comic-book caper and there's plenty of shared DNA to be found in the slick rooftop-hopping, the Sly games are often sharper in their execution, and more elegant in their staging. Even before being spruced up for HD televisions, the series' fondness for bold cartoon lines and colourful, sagging cityscapes was more stylish and personable than the soupy dereliction of Empire City, and its characters remain far more likeable and interesting than the biff-faced Cole and that moronic friend of his with the sunglasses.

Actually, the ambience of Sly Cooper can be hard to pin down precisely. At times, the games come on like Looney Tunes at its slapstick best, while elsewhere playing them is like finding yourself in a Pink Panther flick, without the unpleasant business of discovering that Peter Sellers is a gaping shell of a man when the cameras aren't rolling. (I know this because I saw a film about him once.) Very occasionally, when the slinky, strings-heavy soundtrack clicks together just so with the game's nocturnal preoccupations, the whole thing comes close to exhibiting the poised class of an old Bogart movie. Not bad, considering you're playing as a talking raccoon who's best friends with a turtle.

So anyway, before you get to the new stuff – the mini-games, the 3D support, and the Easter-egg teaser – you should know this: The Sly Trilogy is worth owning just for the chance to get these brilliant games together on one disk.

The HD updating has been handled magnificently, which is a pleasant surprise after the faintly botched Prince Of Persia collection. The colours are bright and rich, the frame-rate is super smooth (this is a technical term), and the edges and textures are as sharp as you'd expect for something running in 720p. It doesn't look like a PS2 game as much as it looks like your most nostalgic, wayward memory of a PS2 game, and there's probably an important distinction to be had there.

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Attribution

Vibrant, uncluttered, and filled with great character models and animation, adventures that once rubbed up against the outer limits of their hardware now have a welcome bit of room to breathe, and on the rare occasion that you'll come across a lo-res cinematic that has slipped past unaltered, it merely gives you a chance to see what beautiful restoration work Sanzaru Games has done with the majority of the porting.

While it's brilliant fun to compare textures all day, with an entire trilogy to hand, you'll also have the rare chance to turn curator, poking through the full sweep of a series and watching the ways in which it evolves over time. Sly Cooper was born in pretty good shape, as it happens, but there are still plenty of opportunities to catch of glimpse of Sucker Punch behind the scenes, zeroing in on the aspects that seem worthy of greater focus, and fiddling with the bits that aren't up to scratch.