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Sly Cooper is a wily raccoon with a knack for sneaking. He can climb just about anything, leap and land deftly on the smallest footholds, and use his cane to snag loot from the pockets of enemies. Sly comes from a long line of thieves, but his family was killed by a gang called the Fiendish Five, with whom he dealt handily in the first game.

Bentley is a clever little turtle whom Sly befriended in an orphanage. Bentley has always been the planner, coming up with intricate (if absurd) plans for the Cooper Gang's heists. He's confined to a wheelchair after having been grievously injured at the end of Sly 2. His chair has a host of gadgets to aid him in field work.

Sly met Murray in the orphanage, too. Murray, or “The Murray,” as he calls himself, is a bit of a muscle head, but he has a big heart. When Bentley was injured, Murray blamed himself for not being able to protect the little guy and he left the gang to seek redemption.

This time, the gang is on recruiting missions to bolster their ranks with special talent for a big job. It seems Sly's family has a vault on a secret island where they've been storing all their loot for generations. The island has been taken over by a crazy baboon named Dr. M, who was once ran with Sly's father. Dr. M is bitter that Cooper got all the glory, and now he has anger issues. If Sly wants to claim his birthright, he'll have to get by Dr. M to do it, and he'll need all the help he can get.

Sly 3 plays very much like Sly 2. Once again, the game is based on a series of episodes in exotic locations around the globe. Once again, each episode has a melodramatic title that sounds like a Scooby Doo cartoon. Again, there are several missions in each locale building up to a great caper. The missions vary greatly, from platform jumping as Sly, to hacking computers as Bentley, to smashing things as Murray. Four additional characters join the gang along the way, each with their own specialties and gameplay styles.

There are lots of cool mini games and action sequences to keep gameplay fresh. I really don't want to give away too much, but the gameplay is so varied and diverse it's really hard to classify it as any one thing. There are boat chases and bi-plane dog fights and RC car races and my favorite - pirate ship sea battles! You'll never get bored of doing the same thing over and over.

What's really distinctive about the series is that the gameplay is always designed to be fun and not cumbersome or frustrating. Sly himself pulls off some incredibly dexterous, acrobatic moves, but the game does not rely on the player to remember complicated button combos. For the most part, you just use the circle button to use a special move. Sly is pretty good at knowing what it is you want him to do, and he just does it.

The same goes for the minigames. In any given mission, you could be doing something completely new, but the controls are always simple and easy to master. This makes the game accessible to younger players, and to adults who aren't particularly deft at button masher games.

The gang faces off against a variety of foes; from a water-polluting, opera-singing lion, to a misogynistic, tyrannical rooster named General Tsao (yuk yuk), to a ruthless, boastful parrot pirate named LuFwee, all of the characters in Sly 3 are colorful and broadly drawn. Sly and the gang face each one with determination, and carry out some of the most ludicrous, but hilarious, hi-jinx you could imagine.

Once again, the determined Inspector Carmelita Fox is always right on their tails. The voice of the foxy cop has been replaced again, and not for the better. She sounds like someone trying to fake an accent, but it's so bad I can't even tell what kind. For the first time in the series, though, we do get to play as Carmelita.

Sly's voice is different, too, but that change is more tolerable. As far as I could tell, the other voices are the same as in Sly 2, and all are very well done. The music is superb as well, contributing greatly to that cartoon-cum-videogame quality that has defined the series from the get go.

The game still makes use of cell-shaded graphics, and frankly I've never seen another game do it nearly as well. The technique fits this franchise perfectly. The environments are colorful and lively. Every character is distinctive and detailed in both design and animation.

This second sequel introduces a few 3D action sequences, which thankfully are entirely optional. The 3D stuff just isn't very good. It certainly didn't make the scenes pop out, and really only served to make it hard to see what was going on. Everything turned dull, gray and murky with the 3D glasses on.

Furthermore, the glasses themselves were cheesy perforated cardboard tear-outs from the game manual. When I saw the game at E3, they were handing out cool-looking 3D glasses as a promo bit. Those were cardboard as well, but they looked neat and were styled with the distinct Sly logo and everything. The man handing them out said that “much cooler” 3D glasses would be shipping with the game. I have to guess that ended up not being in the budget, because he couldn't have been talking about these. I wish I'd kept the E3 glasses.

Another first to the series is a handful of split-screen multiplayer modes. Two players can face off as Sly and Carmelita in either a cops & robbers treasure hunt game, or try to blast one another out of the sky in bi-planes. Or play as Sly and Bentley and stalk one another on pirate ships in some high-seas adventure. The final multiplayer option is to play co-operatively in Bentley's computer hacking mini-game. While these are fun additions, I'd rather Sucker Punch had spent that time and money to add another episode to the game.

I was rather disappointed that Sly 3 abandons some of the most enjoyable features of its predecessors. In both previous games, every location was littered with “clue bottles” that led to hidden treasure. The second game also had valuable objects scattered over each level that let Sly put his thieving skills to work. Both features are absent from this sequel, and I miss them. Little touches like that that made me really love Sly 2.

Sure, in Sly 3, there are some “Master Thief Challenges” that you can attempt in each level after completing it, but most of them are just repeating certain action sequences from the game under a time limit or other restrictions. They just aren't as fun “extras” as were in the previous game.

I don't love Sly 3 quite as much as I did Sly 2, but that's hardly a condemnation of the game. I really had a blast playing it, and I highly recommend the series. If you played the first two and liked them, then there's really no two ways about it: you must play Sly 3. If you've never played any of them, then I simply can't recommend a better series of PlayStation 2 games to play.