[#] Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves (Sony, 2005)

A fittingly quick exit for a thief game, I suppose.

If Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves doesn't top the second game, it's only because Sucker Punch wisely decided to not fix what isn't broken. Sly learns of a gigantic inheritance owed to him in a vault on an island in the South Pacific and assembles a master team of new (and old—no spoilers) faces to help get him inside. Instead of pulling off master heists in each hub world, Sly recruits a new member into the Cooper Gang, again taking him, Bentley and his shattered legs (he's got a sick wheelchair, he'll be fine), and a spiritually-enlightened Murray across the world from Venice to Australia to China.

Sly 3 is most notable for its abruptness and the strands of experimentation that belie its rushed development. It wraps the trilogy up in satisfying fashion (it's at least as funny and multifaceted in its writing as Band of Thieves was), using the previous game's stealthy platforming as a solid base, but it's noticeably shorter than it and the end seems to come weirdly quickly. The new members of the gang are briefly playable, and they each bring a new flavor to the mix, whether it be dogfighting by biplane or plumbing the depths of the seas, but they're not around as much as they maybe should've been.

Technologically, there are some interesting ideas, like an amusing focus on 3D—yes, red-blue anaglyph gameplay for select missions! These noticeably dip the framerate and aren't really worthwhile outside of the novelty. Seemingly noticing the lack of runtime for the story, Sucker Punch brought back and expanded the post-game master thief challenges from the first game, and these are fun enough, though I didn't seriously go for any. Sly 3 does what you want it to, which is put a nice cap on the series in story (and there were never any further games), and I definitely enjoyed going through it. All that said, it really doesn't try terribly hard either.