Ratchet & Clank

The Good
First of all, I want to apologize to a good friend of mine here on Mobygames. Ckeen The Great is an awesome and very critical reviewer here who does not bend for popular titles just because they are popular and is always very direct and honest with his criticism. He has recommended this game quite often to me, so since I don't like it, I felt an apology was required to compensate for all the effort he has wasted on me. Now on to the actual bitching...

Oh no, wait! First we have to talk about the good things:

The environments are nicely detailed and a lot of effort has gone into making them look as active as they could be. On Planet Eudora for example you had all kinds of woodcutting-machinery flying around the map that were carrying logs and not a single inch of space was used as unnecessary padding. It shows that the developers had a very good sense of discipline while planning everything out, which is always better than assuming that size instantly makes a world interesting.

The characters and their stories are pretty interesting to discover and I love how the events of the overall plot sometimes affected the main protagonists in interesting ways. It shows that just because something is aimed at kids, it doesn't have to be a pancake in the story department and the children can also enjoy a pretty decent story. A side bonus is of course that this game is still popular with older audiences to this very date because of this.

Sorry for the rather short of length of this section, but when I start talking about graphics, that's a pretty clear sign that I am out of material... Moving on.

The Bad
The first thing I do when I start writing a story is deciding what the threat is and the severity, the minimum is pretty much that the villain (no matter if it is a person or a nation) is something truly evil and that the stakes are pretty high for the protagonists. I find Ratchet & Clank very lacking here because all the main villain wants to do is creating a new planet with chunks from other planets, the world the protagonist lives on is not even at risk and Clank's motivations were still nowhere to be found at the point where I stopped. The planets are also clearly shown to have a mobilized army and nobody is going to tell me that a few nations can't fight off a single corporate bastard while a single mechanic punches through them like they are nothing.

The economy must be pretty bad in this game, since I literally made thousands of bolts by simply smashing every crate that stood between me and my destination. I always had enough money for all the gear I could possibly want and never had to save up for anything. I had to laugh when a character complained about making 6 bolts per hour, why would you even take a job like that if there are boxes everywhere? All you need to live a rich live is a crowbar and a building to constantly leave and enter.

I found the game to be incredibly easy, which has to be an achievement because I suck at gaming. The problem is that your arsenal is so huge that you always got at least ten creative ways to dispatch anything on your path, turning all the puzzles and boss-fights into simple chores. I beat every boss I ran into by lobbing bombs at it or firing rockets into its face and every puzzle was solved by either the water-tool, lockpick or your trusty wrench.

I mentioned that the events of the story have effect on the characters within it, but while that is a good thing, it doesn't mean I actually like the characters. Ratchet is only ever concerned with collecting valuable toys, Clank is an idiot, none of the characters seemed to give a damn about that whole "Steal parts of the other planets" thing the main villain has going (once again reinforcing my fist point of criticism in this section). It was also annoying that half the plot was dedicated to finding a superhero who was clearly a useless idiot and the plot twist was obvious after just ten minutes of gameplay, but still the game kept going on about it.

The humor didn't rub me up the right way, as in: It totally annoyed the light out of me every second it was present. The game had the annoying tendency to keep going on with certain jokes, things that could have been good for a quick laugh despite their low-brow nature. However, they just keep going on about some of them, the worst was in a park where there was a machine made to look like the earlier mentioned hero that was bouncing around on a spring, but Ratchet took it for the real one. Funny for a quick laugh, but then Ratchet went on for a total of two minutes explaining to Clank it is not the real one... "Yeah, thanks for that, can we get back to gameplay?" was my thought at that moment.

The Bottom Line
Christ, I am tired. I just back from two hours of fitness followed by three hours of working at the hardware store, so sorry if this review is a bit beneath my standard. To cut a story short, I didn't like this game very much. I have been told that "Up your Arsenal" is better and I just happen to have that game here too, but right now I am pretty much done with the series for a while. The story was rather dull and predictable, the gameplay was nowhere near as good as some of my favorite platformers (Psychonauts should be the standard in this case). Graphic-wise it's okay though.

If you played this game back when you were a kid or a teenager, you should play it again whenever you feel like because that is just the little touch that I missed when playing this game. If you have nostalgic memories for this game, go for it. If you want to get into platformers, this is a pretty good place to start as well, but if you are a bit of a veteran, you might want to try out the Nintendo 64 games or Psychonauts on Steam.