One of my favourite platforming franchises from the PS2 era has been revived and ported on to the PS Vita.
Whether you know him as Sly Raccoon, Sly Cooper or just plain old Sly, you can now play all three games in the series in a packaged trilogy release onthe convenient portable platform.
As is often the case with ports of PS2 games, the Vita screen tends to make the games look even better than the originals. This is no exception. The trilogy looks absolutely amazing, helped by the series' trademark cell-shaded, cartoon-style graphics.
Although it wouldn't be a trilogy without all three games in the series, the first game, Sly Raccoon & The Thievius Raccoonus, doesn't hold a candle to the two sequels. It's extremely repetitive, but does serve as an introduction to the characters and style of gameplay as well as the storyline, which flows through all three games. My suggestion would be to move on to Sly 2: Band of Thieves and Sly 3: Honour Among Thieves as soon as possible - the gameplay is more varied, better designed and pure platforming adventure gaming at its best.
Sly 2 and Sly 3 also make good use of the Vita's touch inputs, which can be used for bringing up information or using the binoculars to scout around. It's never a chore and is easy to come to grips with.
There are minor camera issues in all of the games, where the view swings around to awkward angles - but it's easy to manually correct with the right analogue stick and was never game-breaking.
The Sly Trilogy is the best-looking PS2 port to date and worthy of anyone's Vita game collection. Ian Knott
