Sly Cooper and the gang have returned. Sucker Punch Productions, originally known for Rocket: Robot on Wheels, put together quite a hit in the original Sly Cooper and the Thievious Racoonus. The game had oodles of style, with great art and designs, excellent gameplay, a unique soundtrack, and an interesting plot. As a sequel, Sly 2: Band Of Thieves improves on nearly every aspect that made the original so memorable.

Stealth games are still fairly popular these days and the Sly Cooper series falls into that genre to an extent. Though as with the original, Sly 2 takes the stealth style of gameplay and happily marries it to a platform type game. The results are a fun to play game with a variety of your typical platformer goals mixed in with stealth-themed environments and aspects.

For those not acquainted with Sly Cooper and his story, here's a quick overview. Sly Cooper is a descendent from the legendary Cooper Racoon thief clan, and in his first game he was primarily involved in recovering various pieces of the Thievious Racoonus. The Thievious Racoonus is the Cooper family's legendary book of thieving secrets, and was pilfered by the evil robotic owl, Clockwerk. Clockwerk also was involved in the murder of Sly's father. After reassembling the Thievious Racoonus and dispatching and disassembling Clockwerk, Sly went on a much needed vacation. Another band of thieves known as The Klaww Gang have stolen back the various parts of Clockwerk for use in their various illegal schemes, and knowing the power they possess, Sly along with his gang (Bently the turtle and Murray the hippo) head out to track them down.

The game's intro does a great job in filling in the storyline covered in the first title, and subsequent episodes begin with excellent comic-book style animated cut-scenes, complete with great voice work and music. Once again, the angular comic book-style art direction and script is truly unique and fresh and would really make a great Cartoon Network or Saturday morning cartoon series of some type.

Sly 2 is built around several "Episodes", each of which is packed full of tasks and goals to complete. The episodes take place in a variety of locations, such as the streets of Paris at night, or the wide-open snowy white north of Canada. The first few episodes look and feel somewhat similar, though the goals are mostly unique in design. At any given time there can be up to several goals to complete, either by Sly, Bently or Murray. Sly usually is assigned the more stealth-style goals, Murray takes on those that require more brawn, and Bently, those that may need a bit of a brainier approach. Some of the more simple goals definitely repeat to an extent, though the developers do a good job dressing them up in different clothing. Goal examples range from the pick-pocketing of keys and objects, to the taking of surveillance photos, to piloting an armed R.C. chopper in an overhead perspective, to even coaxing a big blind bear to destroy certain objects by throwing fish at specific locations. One thing that Sucker Punch tried to do, was to include a wide variety of tasks to keep things fresh. Regardless of the particular goal or character you are playing as, the game plays incredibly tight just like the original. Pulling off various attacks, performing sneaky stealth moves or navigating the levels never feels like a chore. Most tasks are of simple to moderate difficulty, but every so often you'll hit one which may cause a controller to be flung. Boss type fights don't occur every episode like your typical platformer-type title. But those that you will encounter are fun, but not quite as enjoyable as those in Sly 1. On a side note, I was unfortunate enough to expose a rare though serious glitch in the game after the Lumberjack Games task but before the boss fight. Manually saving your progress at that point will "wedge" the game in such a way where it is impossible to continue. This was also the reason why this review was written later than planned. Thankfully, after verifying the glitch, SCEA and Sucker Punch found a few methods of fixing or getting around this problem.

The game is definitely less collection-based than the first game, and is quite linear when compared to most other modern platformers. Besides the hidden clue bottles (to unlock special techniques/items), and coins which pop out of nearly all elements of the destructible environments (to buy new techniques/items) , Sly 2 doesn't force you to spend hours in each episode looking for various hidden items. The very nature of the episode goals will have you exploring mostly every inch of the external and internal environment, so in a level design respect, it's not really an issue. But from a replay standpoint, after completing a stage 100%, there is never a reason to return to it. I personally never dedicate too much time with the optional item collection schemes found in platformers, so I don't mind all that much. But there are plenty of gamers who love the challenge of tracking down hidden Easter eggs, so they may balk at the relative lack of item hunting that the game has. Overall, the game is definitely longer than the original game, at least twice as long, though there is less incentive to go at it all again.

Sly 2 is a gorgeous game. The unique cel-shading and overall art and style is just second to none. The environments are even larger and more varied, and the slowdown and frequent motion-blur effect as found in Sly 1 is totally gone. Once or twice that strange PS2 resolution dropping phenomenon rears its ugly head (once even during a cut scene oddly enough), though it's literally only a few times in the entire game. Most of the game, the framerate speeds along at 60fps with a ton of effects and impressive textures and lighting.

The audio once again is excellent in nearly every aspect. The dynamic soundtrack and effects perfectly fit the cartoon-like look and stealthy feel of the game. The voice acting is mostly very good, but there are a few overly scripted sounding moments.

Sly 2: Band Of Thieves is a worthy videogame sequel, and those that liked the original, will love this follow-up. Those not familiar with the series and who are interested in a great looking, stylish and unique stealth/platformer, should give Sly 2 a try.