This game brings you to China, Utah, Wales Triangle, Haydes, Russia, and Paris, France. Your character is a master thief raccoon who steals from thieves and villains. In this game you are accompanied by your friends Bentley the Brain and Murray the not so smart but brawny teammate that can drive a car as well.

In each area, you need to collect 7 treasure keys to activate each boss other than Clockwerk. Generally, you need one key to enter the place, three keys to expand into the next area, and seven keys total to go to the boss. I find that the order of difficulty from easiest to hardest is Raleigh the Frog, the Panda King, Mz. Ruby, Mugshot (who appears in the third game as well as Panda King), and Clockwerk. Clockwerk is a difficult fight (not even saying the hard part before it with your vehicle smashing the lava slugs and blowing up a path into the mountain… the Bentley hacking part is fairly difficult too) Clockwerk has 2 flying forms which the first one he sends purple missiles the second he sends lightning rings you must stay inside of not to be electrocuted. After that you dismount from the jet pack you were using and must clear a path using your legendary thieving opportunities you will eventually (after possibly triggering the alarms) be able to smash his skull and grab his part. There are vaults scattered over some of the levels and you need to find bottled up clues to get the code. When you have enough and you get to the vault Bentley will tell you the combination.

The vaults mainly contain sections of the Thievius Raccoonus but some of the vaults contain information for the area where other clues or valuables are and one has an interesting thing that shows what the name of the type of guard you see is and its hobbies.

One of the hardest levels for me was the racing one in Mugshot’s place. You start off in 5th place and have to pass the other cars in 3 laps time. It is requiring both skill and luck. The nitros really help you there. After you beat a level you can do the time trial on it (even though for most of them I didn’t do the time trial for I did not have enough time…). In order to pull off a master thief move there will be a glowing blue aura and you must either jump and hit the circle button or just hit and hold the circle button. After you beat the game the first time around Bentley tells you that you have not collected all of the pages of the Thievius Raccoonus. It is not possible to get all of them until after you defeat Clockwerk. There s also a great Japanese video you get after the credits roll for the first time around.

This game has been great for many years and it continues to be a classic. I rate this game a 9.
Gifted Gamer