Best Platformer Games Like Sly Cooper

The best platformer games like Sly Cooper are Sly 2: Band of Thieves, Jak and Daxter and Ratchet and Clank. Below are 6, each with the reason it is here — and, at the end, what filtering to platformer costs you.

Why Platformer Is a Good Answer for Sly Cooper

Filtering to platformer means you want the movement itself to be the pleasure. It is the right filter when the thing you liked was getting from one place to another.

What you get: A game you can judge in ten seconds. Platformers live or die on the jump, and a good one feels right before anything else happens.

What made Sly Cooper worth playing in the first place is covered on the full list. This page is the platformer part of that answer, and only the platformer part.

6 Platformer Games Like Sly Cooper

  1. 1. Sly 2: Band of Thieves

    The sequel opened it up into full heist missions and is the best of the three.

  2. 2. Jak and Daxter

    Same era, same studio family, same PS2 cartoon craft.

  3. 3. Ratchet and Clank

    The third pillar of the PS2 mascot trio, and the most mechanically generous.

  4. 4. Mark of the Ninja

    Stealth made readable and fair, with the same forgiving spirit.

  5. 5. Stealth Inc 2

    Puzzle stealth, quick to restart, never punishing.

  6. 6. Sunset Overdrive

    For the rooftop traversal, if movement was the real appeal.

What This Filter Leaves Out

Weight. Platformers rarely carry a story you will think about afterwards, and the collectible-led ones can become checklists if you let them.

Specifically, these are strong answers for Sly Cooper that are not platformer games, so they are not on this page:

The full list is on games like Sly Cooper — 9 picks, no genre filter.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the best platformer game like Sly Cooper?

Sly 2: Band of Thieves. The sequel opened it up into full heist missions and is the best of the three.

Are all of these on the PlayStation 2?

No. Sly Cooper released on the PlayStation 2, but a recommendation is only useful if you can play it, so the picks above span platforms and eras. What they share is the genre and the reason.

What separates a good platformer from a bad one?

Whether the move set is complete early. The great ones give you everything in the first level and spend the rest asking better questions of it; the weak ones drip-feed abilities to disguise thin level design.

2D or 3D?

Different games. 2D platformers are about precision on a single screen; 3D ones are about reading space and camera. Each pick below says which it is.

How are these chosen?

By hand. Each pick was written for the full Sly Cooper list first, on what the game actually does, and this page is the part of that list that is platformer — never a genre tag lookup, which is how "best racing games like Super Mario 64" used to be a page on this site.

Other Angles on Sly Cooper

More Platformer Games Recommendations

Or read the platformer guide for where to start in the genre generally.