Sly Cooper and the Thievious Raccoonus -- Initial Impressions.

I will be doubling up on some games here due to it approaching the heart of the busy holiday season. While I continue to play GTA: LCS, I have started in on Sly Cooper and the Thievious Raccoonus. SCatTR is a classic 3D platform game that puts you into the character of Sly Cooper, a raccoon from a long line of master thieves. His family collected all their secrets over the ages into a book called the Thievious Raccoonus. On the day he was to come of age the book was due to be passed down to him. Unfortunately a gang of master thieves called The Fiendish Five showed up and killed Sly's father and stole the Thievious Raccoonus. Sly was sent off to an orphanage where he met his friends Murray and Bentley who would later become part of his team. The actual gameplay starts with you breaking into police headquarters in France to steal the case file so you can get the information you need to start hunting The Fiendish Five, who have broken up the Thievious Raccoonus into individual pages and taken them to their individual hideouts. Once you succeed in taking the case file, it's off to the each of the hideouts. I have played the game through the first of the Fiendish Five member's hideouts. The first hideout was broken into seven levels and one boss level. The main thing that comes to mind from the initial playing is the art design and the look of the game. It uses cell-shading and a wonderfully western animation art design that makes it look like you're playing a modern Saturday morning cartoon. The animation is extremely fluid. You really do feel like you're controlling a cartoon. The story and characterization also feel as if they're straight from a cartoon. It's clear the production value is very high, but how's the actual gameplay? Next time we'll find out.