Last night’s brief snippet of Sly Cooper footage at Sony’s press
conference was met by cheers, but immediate lack of Sucker Punch’s logo
during today’s showing of Sly
Cooper: Thieves in Time prompted
a much more skeptical response. One minute into the presentation, I
turned to 1UP’s Thierry Nguyen and said, “I know what my first question
is going to be: who are
you guys?”
Lucky for us, the kind people
at Sanzaru Games addressed the question that was on everyone’s mind —
kind of a necessity when an esteemed franchise like Sly is handed off
to an entirely new team. Project Lead Matt Kraemer made it clear from
the very beginning that he and his team were big fans of Sly Cooper;
and apparently, Sanzaru’s work on The
Sly Collection showed both Sony
and former Sly developer Sucker Punch that the team knew how to handle
Sly’s entertaining blend of stealth and action — a hard mix to get
right.
During today’s presentation,
Sanzaru showed off two demos, the first one involving typical Sly
Cooper antics, with a quick switch to hippo sidekick Murray to solve
some rudimentary puzzles. Honestly, it didn’t seem too different from
the ground Sly tread in the past, but that’s not exactly a bad thing;
the folks at Sanzaru let us know that Thieves in Time is their attempt
to combine everything they love about the series into a single game.
And from what little they’ve shown us, they seem to be on the right
track.
