Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart

Only played for a little to start but I liked the start. It was decent enough. It’s a kids game and I need to be in the right mood for a kids game but it seems pretty fun. First impressions are it will be better than psychonaughts 2, but we will see. 

It’s quite good. The weapons are fun. The combat is actually quite good. It looks really nice. I’ve been enjoying the weapons upgrade system. Definitely better than psychonauts 2. Insomniac is great and traversal and character movement. Spider-Man and this game both feel fantastic to whip around the map.

I’m really impressed with the number of guns and the creativity of the guns. There are a lot of fun weapons that look interesting and play very differently. 

I’ve bumped the difficulty up to the max because I’m liking this game and I don’t want to coast through it.

I’m still flying through this game because it’s been super fun. 

Beat and loved it. Maybe my favourite “kids” game I’ve played. Depends how you catoegirize kids games but regardless it was a lot of fun and might be my fave. I nearly 100% the game. 98% and played on the hardest difficulty. It was a lot of fun. Have I said that already. I immediately downloaded the 2016 ratchet and Clank which shows how much I liked this one. I won’t play it right away and I’m sure I’m going to be disappointed because it won’t be as great as this one was but someday I’m going to play it.

Final Score: A-

Rift Apart is the prettiest looking game I have ever played. The Performance RT mode is absolutely nuts and is a snapshot into an awesome future where people will be able to buy current-gen consoles, and developers actually create games optimized for them. Alas, we are not fully in that future yet.

Rift Apart is about the safest of safe sequels one could possibly make. They introduce a female Lombax whose whole personality is that she has gotten destroyed by Nefarious where Ratchet has succeeded. While others praise the fact that the guns, gear, and upgrades carry over from Lombax to Lombax, there is absolutely nothing distinct about the two leads in play style at all. I would’ve loved to see different powers, guns, etc unique to each character. This would have created a varied playstyle. Because the leads look so much alike from the back, especially with the armor I put on them, the only way I knew who I was playing as was the voice acting. 

The level design is incredibly linear. When I decided to deviate from the path to explore, it always proved to be a mistake because the content was locked behind returning trips to the planet that I was not supposed to visit yet. I had no way of knowing this and continually got frustrated that I couldn’t find a Gold Bolt that was literally impossible for me to find.

While it seems like you are visiting varied and unique planets, they are mostly just small, on rails levels that do not offer the expanse and grandiose of modern gaming. Not saying I want an open-world Ratchet & Clank, but any sort of innovation on the formula would have been nice. The gimmick or thing about this game is the rift hoping ability which isn’t that different from a hook-shot honestly, and when the few dimension hopping levels still remain very linear so it doesn’t feel interesting.

The battles are all terribly easy or surprisingly challenging. There is no in-between. The power-curve of the game balloons so fast that soon I shoot out tons of drones, mushrooms, sprinklers, that are doing majority of the damage.

The comedy is idiotic and the story is dumb. If this game wasn’t so beautiful I would have thought far less of it, but spending time in the world did remind me of the platform, collectible, family-friendly whimsy of PS2 era platformers or this ilk like Spyro, etc.

I will still take a solid single-player game like PS Studios is putting out over the drecks of look-a-like shooters hitting the market out there. The team needs to innovate in gameplay and world in addition to graphic overhaul for its next entry.