Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves: Crime Wave Continues Company: Sony Interactive Entertainment America Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves brings that Thievius Raccoonus back into the lineup but this time you will find yourself in control of more than just the sneaky masked critter. Honor Among Thieves and Sucker Punch build on the successful franchise with new features like multiplayer head-to-head action, biplane-based dog-fighting and using your friends (Murray the Hippo and the wheelchair confined Bentley) and their special attributes to find and unlock Cooper's birthright. The demo disc of Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves had several sample levels. One level started off with your gang in a lemonade drinking competition with a bunch of dingos. Once you beat the dogs at their game, you then face them on a bar-brawl. In this fight you will find yourself switching between each of the three characters and get a feel for their attacks and strengths like Murray's muscle or Bentley's speed. Other demo levels include taking control of a Koala shaman who can change his shape to evade dingos and kangaroo guards. When enemies have their backs turned, he can hop on their back and ram them into walls, other guards or mining equipment. Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves will also put you behind the stick of a biplane. The level challenges you to shoot down 30 enemies before they take you down. As you fly over the farmland, you can destroy the bridges, barns, trees and pretty much anything else that stands out. For added realism, if you fly too high, your plane begins to stall and as you start to fall towards the ground, you have to work to get the engine restarted. In the game's two-player feature, Sly will face off against Carmelita Fox. In this Cooper vs. Copper death-match mode, the two characters will run around a large city. Sly's goal is to avoid the foxy fuzz while collecting treasures while Carmelita's goal is to stop Sly at any cost. Eventually, the scores will be tallied and the winner will be announced. But, what is the story of Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves? In the wake of the big boss battle that ended Sly 2: Band of Thieves, Bentley becomes horribly injured. Though the brainy turtle survives, he is paralyzed from the waist (do turtles have waists?) down. Murray, grief stricken and feeling guilty, leaves the band and roams the earth as a hermit. Now alone, Sly learns that his family of thieves has been storing their stolen treasures in a secret vault that only a Cooper can open. When the sneaky 'coon finds the mountain sized safe, he also finds a fiendish character who has been trying to break into it for years. Now Cooper has to regroup his friends and break into his vault to steal his own gold. This rich story, added to the new gameplay features, is bound to make Sly 3 an action/platformer game to watch out for. Mind you, the demo disc didn't have everything. A feature I got to play with at E3 that wasn't in this demo is Honor Among Thieves's 3D levels. During certain levels, you will need to put on a pair of 3D glasses and play the game while various objects appear to come out of the TV as you sneak Sly around. Hopefully, this feature hasn't been taken out and we will still see this unusual asset in the final product. Look for Sly 3 later this month sporting a rating of E +10. -J.R. Nip, GameVortex Communications AKA Chris Meyer Related Links: Sly Cooper Home Page Other Games from Sucker Punch Sony Computer Entertainment America