Ratchet & Clank is one of the oldest game series (the first installment was released almost 20 years ago, in 2002), all games in which, except for literally one or two mobile projects, were released exclusively for Sony consoles. Five years have passed since the release of the last part of the adventures of the inseparable couple – Lombax Ratchet and his constant companion, robot Clank, and now we finally got the opportunity to meet the old friends again.
Insomniac Games, the authors of Spyro the Dragon, Resistance, and Marvel’s Spider-Man series, are the almost unchanged developer of the whole series, starting from the very first project for PlayStation 2. They are responsible for the previous game, Ratchet & Clank (2016) for PlayStation 4, which was, in fact, a remake of the very first part, “mixed” with the cartoon of the same name, released in the same year. They also worked on a new game – the sixteenth installment in the series, Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, the second big exclusive for PlayStation 5. To confuse those who are only familiar with the series: Rift Apart is not a sequel to the 2016 game – it’s a direct sequel to the previous installment, Ratchet & Clank: Nexus, which was released in 2013 on PlayStation 3.
From the very beginning Rift Apart was promoted as a project that would clearly show what the “iron” of the new console is capable of – and the beginning of the game does not disappoint. Ratchet and Clank, recognized and adored heroes of the whole galaxy, take part in a large-scale and spectacular parade in their honor, and the screen literally explodes with colors, a huge number of various objects and a lot of tiny details, so that sometimes it’s even hard to keep track of what’s happening in the frame. Of course, all good things for our heroes quickly come to an end, and their eternal adversary, the supervillain Dr. Nefarius, bursts into the holiday. He gets his hands on a powerful weapon, an artifact of the Lombax race called “Dimensionator” (Dimensionator), which is capable of piercing rifts in space through which you can get into other dimensions – and, of course, he is eager to use it to finally realize his deepest dream of “killing all humans”. Naturally, the situation quickly gets out of control, and the festivities end with the chaotic opening of portals, through which the inseparable (until now) couple makes an extremely spectacular journey, rushing through the most different worlds at incredible speed.
She ends up in a kind of parallel world, where the local Nefarius is more successful in seizing power than our old acquaintance – so here he is not some kind of “Doctor”, but the very “Emperor”. And, what is not less important – there are also alternative versions of the main characters, a female Lombax Rivet and a robot with a mysterious past and incomprehensible to the time prejudices against friendly relations – Kit (also obviously female). As it is easy to guess, despite the fact that the world in the game turns out to be new, our task is as old as the game’s universe: to stop Dr. Nefarius. That is, the Emperor. Both of them, anyway.
As we progress through Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, we’ll find ourselves under the control of old Ratchet or the new girl Rift. Yes, the appearance of a new playable lombax has revitalized the universe lore (and will surely be a source of inspiration for an endless stream of fan-art in various genres) – Rivet, the leader of the local Resistance, turned out to be a really interesting character with a well-written story. Gameplay-wise, however, there is no special difference between them – they are controlled in the same way, and even the arsenal of weapons is fully synchronized between them as you buy new guns and upgrade old ones. Except that in the chain of blows with melee weapons, Rivet’s final blow looks different.
People unfamiliar with the cycle often think that Ratchet & Clank is an ordinary platformer, where Ratchet runs/jumps on complicated multi-level junctions and hits enemies on the head with a giant wrench. In fact, this is primarily… a third-person shooter – of course, with a fair share of jumping between platforms. The trademark wrench is good only against the weakest opponents, on which ammunition is a pity (and, of course, against numerous crates – an endless source of nuts, the local currency). Ratchet’s (and now Rivet’s) main arsenal is a variety of exotic “guns” that destroy numerous enemies at a distance – from melee weapons like Executor’s “lightning shotgun” to the quite traditional Headhunter sniper rifle, whose telescopic sight is also capable of slowing down the passage of time.
As a result, the action in the game is a kind of run’n’gun shooter, where ordinary skirmishes with the enemy are passed in “meat” mode, and in the arenas begins a natural cartoon DOOM (in its modern implementation) – there are a lot of enemies, they come from all sides, and our Lombaxes spin like crazy, trying to shoot in all directions at once, constantly switching between guns and at the same time not staying longer than a couple of seconds in one place. And boss fights sometimes look like an extremely light version of some Returnal: we memorize behavior patterns, dodge numerous beams and other long-range weapons, bounce from the melee attack line and maneuver between “puddles” with area damage.
Those who have played the previous installments may notice at this point that the description of gameplay in Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart looks suspiciously like something they’ve seen before, and they’d be right. Despite the innovations, Rift Apart basically follows the traditions of the series, without bringing anything particularly new to the usual gameplay. On the one hand, the rule “if it’s not broken, don’t fix it” hasn’t been abolished, but on the other hand – if you’ve recently played, for example, the previous part, Ratchet & Clank 2016 (a couple of months ago it was given away for free), you’ll have a strong sense of déjà-vu when playing Rift Apart: the new game sometimes seems like some HD remaster of its predecessor.
Yes, there are two main characters now, but the second one is controlled in the same way and differs from the first one, in fact, only by the color of fur and the presence of a female voice. And even the main “feature” of the game, the rifts, which at the announcement stage looked like the most important innovation in gameplay, actually change almost nothing in it. The player can’t place them at will – this isn’t Portal, after all. Yes, the rifts regularly appear in story videos and actively participate in the development of the plot, but in the course of the game they mostly either just decorate the local sky in the background, or serve to deliver another portion of cannon fodder on the heads of the main characters. With few exceptions, they are mostly available to the player for two purposes: either as fixed points of quick movement on the map, or to penetrate into “pocket dimensions” (pocket dimensions) – mini-levels hidden on the locations with a simple task to get a piece of collectible armor with various bonuses. Even between planets you have to travel the old-fashioned way – by spaceship; the demonstration of portal technology at the very beginning of the game, where we flew through a chain of rifts through half a dozen worlds in a matter of seconds, remained the only example of its active “interplanetary” use.
As a result, the rifts mostly work as just another way to quickly jump across the map (for example, in an arena with waves of enemies or to move to another part of the level, no longer connected to the current one), as an alternative to flying through the air with a cable. But from a purely technical point of view, the rift system really makes a strong impression – a quick “jump” into a portal far away from you looks like you’ve hooked it and… dragged the whole map towards you, while reality seems to split – you simultaneously stay in one place and quickly “glide” through space. Moving even to another world is completely seamless and without the slightest signs of any subloads – according to the developers, it was possible thanks to the superfast SSD in PlayStation 5.
In general, in technical terms Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart looks very good. All models, including enemies and objects on the levels, are very detailed, and the models of the main characters in general consist of ~250 thousand polygons each, and in video inserts on the engine the game looks like a full-fledged expensive DreamWorks cartoon. Like in other PS5 projects, Rift Apart has 3 video modes: Fidelity (maximum image quality with raytracing, in full-fledged 4K with frame rate of 30 fps), Performance RT (abandoning some of the heaviest effects and lowering the resolution, but with raytracing effects and at stable 60 fps) and Performance (60 fps mode without raytracing, but with higher resolution than in Performance RT). While playing the game, you can’t notice any serious difference in the picture between the first two (the lighting and reflections in mirrored surfaces look slightly different, and only that), but 60 fps in such a dynamic game is a very strong argument in favor of Performance RT.
The possibilities of the new controller are used quite actively; as in Returnal, a number of weapons switch between normal and alternate modes through a full press of the DualSense trigger, with overcoming the resistance of the “motors” on a half press, and haptic feedback works the “recoil” in a very wide spectrum, adding to the visual differences between the barrels in the not insignificant arsenal also tactile.
The story campaign will take 15 hours or a bit more to complete, and after defeating the Nefarius, you can either “finish” the trophies by completing missed side quests and collecting collectibles, or start the game over again on a higher difficulty level. To summarize: the return to the world(s) of Ratchet and Clank turned out to be really successful, and playing Rift Apart turns out to be very interesting and exciting, even though the game is not really that much different from the previous parts of the series.