My whole experience with Ratchet & Clank franchise began and originally ended with playing the first 4 games on PS2. The first game was nice, but deeply flawed in several ways. But starting with Going Commando, the first sequel, the series carved its niche. And Rift Apart is still following the basics that were established and improved in 2002-2003. Playing it now, finally available on PCs 2 years since its original release, makes me miss the fact that these types of games aren’t really popular anymore.
For context, there were two well known “mascot platformer” series on Playstation 1 – Crash Bandicoot by Naughty Dog and Spyro the Dragon by Insomniac Games. When the PS2 era started, both companies switched to developing completely new properties, Jak and Daxter and Ratchet & Clank. And in both cases their first attempts were closer to the classic collectathon mascot platformers of the previous generation, but with the first sequels they switched more to being action oriented games focusing on other genre mechanics in addition to just platforming and collecting stuff. For Ratchet & Clank in particular, the focus shifted from melee oriented platforming with fun but limited in ammo weapons to becoming a very simple, but exciting third person shooter with really odd weapons. Every game was an adventure across space, taking place on different planets, and while its story was usually not particularly serious and very cartoony, it knew how to build drama as well and the two main characters, despite the rocky start, became quite likeable and charming by the end of the original run of PS2 games. I missed the entirety of the PS3 titles myself, but from what I gather, the game stories became more complex and serious, switching the tone to a space epic at times.
Which became a bit of a problem when starting to play Rift Apart – some of the charm of the story clearly hinges on the fact that you know what happened during the PS3 era titles so if you didn’t play them you might feel a bit left out. It’s not as much of a problem as with Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection, where a lot of emotional investment from players hinges on already liking the characters from the start. But still, I feel like it may be distracting, given that not only is Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart the first game to release on PCs, there might be a lot of younger players who don’t own a PS3 or PS2 and completely missed on the previous entries as well. Still, as mentioned – it’s not a big problem and the game reminds you about (or introduces you to) key aspects of the series and characters and also drops a lot of new characters and concepts, given that most of the game happens in another reality. The story and characters are lovely for the most part and while they are quite talky, with few exceptions, it’s handled really charmingly and never becomes overwhelming or distracting.
So whenever this is your first Ratchet & Clank game or not, there’s a lot of really fun gameplay to enjoy. Platforming isn’t the main focus so it’s rarely challenging, but it’s very fun and fast paced. Shooting is fun and the weapons are as creative and silly as they tend to be in the franchise – I loved throwing angry mushrooms with guns around, turning enemies into shrubbery or hitting them with a ricocheting projectile all the same. I’d argue that the amount of weapons could be trimmed as some feel like less interesting variations of the existing weapon, but the vast majority of them are cool. And can be upgraded, in a returning feature for the series – there are light RPG-ish aspects to the game as you can get experience by defeating enemies and increase your healthbar and each weapon also gains experience while using it and become better, allowing you to improve it even further with special collectible items.
Exploring the open levels to find collectibles is exciting and the variety of levels is quite impressive. Perhaps not as much as with some of the extremely ambitious games from the PS2 days, but nonetheless each planet is unique, has its own focus and fun gimmick and is fun to run around. Some are a bit too big and even with new super fast movement options feel a bit too much “open world-y”, but it didn’t bother me that much in the end, as none of the levels overstayed their welcome. It’s a tiny bit of a shame that both main characters from different dimensions behave exactly the same – I understand why it was done, but couldn’t help but feel that more of a difference in playstyles would’ve spiced things up even more. But at least some of the new additions to movement and traversal, including the often talked about near instant switch between realities, are really fun and technologically impressive.
The game did have quite a few design oddities, also straight out of PS2 era. Where sometimes rules on the explorable boundaries would be imprecise or inconsistent, some jumps felt delayed in an odd way and some linear sequences were, while clear, not as well choreographed as the majority of the game. But it was never a long enough distraction to harm the experience in a meaningful way. The PC port, as it is at the moment of me writing about it, is impressive and very good, but also not always stable and occasionally prone to weird scripting issues. I’m sure this will all be ironed out, as Nixxes Software are extremely good at their porting jobs, but it’s just worth noting that for now there still might be issues that may need to be solved by reloading last checkpoint.
I enjoyed my time with Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart a lot, it’s a fantastic throwback to the PS2 era big budget action adventures, but on a modern big budget. And it’s a very simple fun adventure with cartoony characters which is not something that games of this caliber do anymore for the most part. But at the same time, it didn’t feel as impactful and exciting as I expected it to be – as something that the first two games in the relatively recent Spyro Reignited Trilogy still manage to be. This game feels more… restrained, I suppose, than what it maybe should’ve been. But nonetheless, it’s a blast.