![]() ![]() Rift Apart is also, unquestionably, gorgeous. The way I play these games, I actually stop using the weapons I've max leveled, because I think it's more interesting to be forced to use a set of weapons you're uncomfortable with. It helps that the weapons gain abilities and look flashier as you upgrade them, but if I'm being completely honest with myself, the main incentive is watching those numbers go up. Similarly, I have always loved watching the numbers go up in the Ratchet & Clank games, switching between one of several dozen weapons not because I'm optimizing the best way to defeat the latest onslaught, but because I want to watch the numbers go up on the newest gun I acquired. Plus, I've never been into MMOs, but the way friends talk about their meditative power, it's easy to see why people fall for the simple joy of watching numbers go up. Once you stack on rockets, the ability to turn enemies into ice, lighting bullets that chain together to hurt several enemies at once? Woof, it makes you excited for every new combat encounter. At one point, I was deploying a set of fungi that could fight enemies, a drone that zipped around taking pot shots, a group of Clank-like robots that ran around deploying punches-all of this before I'd fired a "real" shot. You start the game with only a single weapon, but by the end, you have several dozen you can use simultaneously, and it leads to absolute chaos. It's a joy to load a new Ratchet & Clank and marvel at what quirky guns Insomniac's come up with and the different ways you can use them together. One part that hasn't really changed, because it doesn't require anything beyond new and weird ideas, is combat. It's an area that gestures at a way Insomniac could truly reinvent what a Ratchet & Clank game is without losing its soul in the process, and I spent the rest of the game longing for more of it.Īt some point, I wouldn’t be shocked if the series went full RPG. And that's exactly what I did, slowly filling out the map, following the trail of Rift Apart's well-hidden and satisfying-to-discover collectibles. When I hit a speed bump and was rocketed into the air, thus revealing the scope of the area in front of me, my heart sang at the prospect of spending the next several hours trying to see everything it had to offer. There's one level in particular set in a sprawling desert-the same place you acquire those boots. ![]() Much of Rift Apart is traditional Ratchet & Clank, with players moving through tightly wound and alternating sections of platforming and combat, but a surprising chunk is in some truly large environments that require traversing, exploring, and picking apart massive spaces. The term "open world" is goofy because at the end of the day it just means a big map, and somehow Ubisoft and the Assassin's Creed-ification of the term has severely limited our imaginations. It's fine, though, because Rift Apart has plenty of other ideas with these new tools. It's especially useful in combat, allowing you to instantly warp to the other side of an area, and frequently deployed to hide clever secrets in the world, only accessible by finding the warp. Practically, this means Ratchet and Rivet have access to a really cool grappling hook that lets them bounce around the environment. The dimensional portals are more than just wallpaper-they're interactive. One of the big pitches for Rift Apart has been how the superfast harddrives in machines like the PlayStation 5 allow Insomniac Games, the developer of the Ratchet & Clank series, to implement new ideas. One character in Ratchet's universe, for example, is white. ![]() This setup is delightful for longtime fans because it's a giant "what if?" and a chance to recast long standing characters. You can play as both, swapping between them for story reasons, though they play identical. (In this version, the two aren't pals just yet.) This time, though, they end up in another dimension where they run into their own counterparts: another lombax, Rivet, who also thinks they're alone in the universe and a robot with self-esteem issues. ![]() Reality is falling apart, and once again, Ratchet and his sidekick, Clank, must put things right. This time around, one of the most powerful devices in the universe, the Dimensionator, goes haywire after Ratchet accidentally shoots it, creating randomized and uncontrollable holes between dimensions. ![]()
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