Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time to offer more of everything we love about the rakish raccoon

Here’s what’s great about the Sly Cooper series: It is, unapologetically, an adventure platform game. It doesn’t ever deny its platform heritage – in fact, it embraces it, lovingly, delivering tight controls, tough missions, and those delightful pattern-based bosses. It’s all about timing, about jumps and dodges, feints and attacks. Plus, it’s got some of our favorite characters to grace the PS2.

That’s why we were cautiously curious when the keys were handed over from original dev team Sucker Punch to new studio Sanzaru Games (which worked on the excellent Sly Collection). But after seeing it unveiled at E3, and then again at PAX last week, we’re tossing all caution to the wind. Sanzaru clearly gets what matters about the Sly series, and the game is already looking fabulous. Sure, we’ve yet to play it, but we’re confident Sanzaru is at least on the right path to deliver exactly what we want from a Sly game.

Check out my interview with Sanzaru’s president, Glen Egan. He clearly gets it. But what do you think?