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By Rob (15th May 2008)

The Ratchet and Clank series has introduced a number of successful games to a rather flooded market of platformers, but unfortunately for this installment, the trend fails to continue. The main problem with this game is that it is a port of a game which originally appeared on the PSP, but really failed to make the conversion. But that’s not to say the game is completely worthless; there are still many of the thrills that fans of the series have come to expect over its prosperous lifespan.

The game begins with Ratchet and Clank enjoying a vacation on a peaceful island after a few long and difficult adventures. They are approached by a little girl named Luna who is apparently a big fan of the duo. After taking a few pictures of them in action, she is kidnapped by a group of small robots, called the Technomites, who are sick of people using all of their inventions and never giving them any credit. Ratchet and Clank decide to cut their vacation short in order to save the little girl. As they later discover, the whole situation was an elaborate trap set by the Technomites with the goal of capturing Ratchet and studying him in order to make an army of clones.

As always, the game centers around tons of upgradeable weapons and gadgets, as well as a multitude of armor classes. Armor is strewn about each level; some pieces can be found quite easily while others are extremely difficult to locate. Each successive class adds a certain amount of damage resistance, and if all of the armor from a particular class is equipped, you acquire certain special abilities (for example, one class allows you to set enemies on fire when striking them with your wrench). Every weapon can be upgraded through experience and by purchasing add-ons at certain stations around the various planets. Add-ons, like targeting, can be added to the weapons for a hefty sum at an upgrade station. Certain weapons make vast progressions when jumping from one level to the next, such as the “lacerators” or “shock rocket.” On the other hand, others, no matter how upgraded, are completely useless, such as the “concussion gun,” which rarely inflicts damage on an enemy due to the lack of aim and power (most of the time the gun shoots far above its target). Towards the end of the game, most enemies take an unbelievable number of hits before finally dropping, even when using the best guns at the height of their abilities. This can be quite frustrating because you often run out of ammo far before the large groups of enemies have been destroyed. You can purchase an item which allows you to buy ammo mid-fight but at a much, much higher cost. It can be rather annoying to have to purchase ammo multiple times during a fight and waste a huge amount of cash (or bolts in this case). Also, even with some of the most advanced armor and a maxed out health bar, it only takes a few hits to kill Ratchet. Even the smallest enemies can kill you in three or four hits later on in the game, requiring replaying certain parts many times over before finally being able to proceed. This leads me to another point: Checkpoints can often be far too spread out, causing you to replay large sequences before returning to your previous point of death.

Although the idea of porting a game from a handheld system to a console may seem backwards, it’s not an altogether bad thought if it is done correctly due to the large base of PS2 owners. Unfortunately in this case, when making the jump from the PSP to the PS2, there are many, many unresolved issues. The first and most noticeable are the substandard graphics. It appears as though they made little to no effort to improve them over the PSP’s. It is as if you took a thumbnail picture and enlarged it without improving the resolution; the graphics are bland and rough. The camera angles were a close second for the most frustrating part of the game. You find yourself constantly having to manage the camera amid a barrage of flying plasma and rockets, which, needless to say, can be distracting and annoying. Furthermore, the camera will often get stuck on various parts of the level, shake about needlessly, and jump from place to place. These problems are amplified significantly when in a confined area and can add a considerable amount of frustration to an already difficult situation. Less notable are the strange audio problems (which only occurred a few times) that cause the sound to cut out during cut-scenes. This isn’t a very big deal since the story line isn’t all that compelling in the first place. Much of the humor that I have come to expect from a Ratchet and Clank title is either missing or poorly executed. The voice acting is as good as ever, but the lack of a strong plot and decent writing causes you to care very little about the cut-scenes.

There are a variety of mini-games that must be completed in order to advance in the game, such as “skyboarding,” rail-riding, and a collection of challenges only available to Clank, like the demo derby or the bot puzzles. The controls for most of these games are rather flawed, but skyboarding in particular suffers from unwieldy maneuvering. The only game that is at all enjoyable is the rail-riding, which is used periodically by Ratchet to unlock doors. The other mini-games add very little if anything at all to the overall game (except for more frustration, but there is enough of that already).

Probably the saddest part of the game is the attempt at multiplayer. And by multiplayer, I mean a max of two players, split screen, with no online capabilities whatsoever, and a complete lack of variety. There is a versus and a Co-Op mode, but neither moves past the most basic game types, and they won’t keep your attention for more than 20 minutes. I’m not really sure why they included multiplayer at all. The time would have been better spent fixing all of the other problems in the game.

The game isn’t altogether horrible, it just has a lot of unresolved issues, stemming for the most part from the fact that it was ported from the PSP to the PS2. I’m not sure if porting in this direction is the best idea, unless some serious time is spent fixing all of the problems which are inherent in this sort of hand-held to console jump. Obviously in this case the time wasn’t taken, and a seriously mediocre game came out of it. Hopefully, in the future, High Impact Games learns from this mistake and produces more of the high-caliber action that we have come to expect and enjoy from the Ratchet and Clank series.