Cool game, compared to Valfaris I think the shmup formula works better for the kind of atmosphere they're trying to sell. I still feel like it lacks ambition, it's not really pushing boundaries on difficulty, spectacle (too many reused animations, enemies and patterns, not enough environmental effects despite the really cool art style) or lore (the idea of the world is cool but it's not really going in any depth about it) so it probably won't end up as too memorable. Still it's fun to play at the end of the day and they managed to make melee not feel awful in a shoot'em up so I'd recommend it if the premise sounds appealing to you.

Traditional Arcade styled kinda remix of classic Pac-Man as a platformer.
I don't think Annalynn's formula works all that well in comparison, my main issue being with the snakes (ghost equivalent). They can very often be off-screen so it's hard to track them and they have really erratic behavior, sometimes instantly turning around when you're following them to kill you but most frustrating being going through doors and popping up just on top of you. It really makes the game a lot more frustrating that it needed to be and not what I'd expect from an arcade game that shouldn't have any incentive to empty your wallet with cheap deaths.

Pretty big disappointment considering how much praise I see for it, dropping after 5 hours just off of episode 3.
I don't think it was a bad idea to have this open area structure, it really helps selling the whole heist thing but they definitely should have been half as long. As it is it really feels like you're running in circles doing the same things over and over again to get to the different jobs and even those need you to get through the same things most of the time, I'm really missing the tighter level design and variety in environments that was in sly 1.
Having Bentley and Barney be playable help you feel like a proper "band of thieves" and they control a lot better than I was expecting considering how it usually goes with these kinda games, still the areas really feel like they were designed for Sly first most of the time.
The game also has a lot more combat than the first and I'm kind of confused as to why they went that route because it's really not fun, the boss fights being focused on that really sucked the fun out of them compared to the more platforming focused ones in the first game.