Developer: Insomniac Games
Available on: Playstation 5
For a long time now Sony has been hyping up the hardware capabilities of the PS5, but until now, no game has really taken advantage of it. Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, the first full length Ratchet & Clank game since 2009, was advertised to be the first to really do so, and it delivers on that front.
The visuals and environments of the game are fantastic. Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart is arguably the best looking game out there right now. Every asset and texture is highly detailed regardless if they’re the main character or some rock in the background. Maps and environments are filled to the brim with structures and assets. The worlds feel very alive and they have some truly mind-blowing sights.
Entire maps can be loaded in seconds, and the game takes advantage of it. One minute, I’m fighting a series of enemies in a city, the next I’m being thrown into all sorts of portals taking me to new places and forcing me to react to my new environments. The game contains a number of these action sequences where you practically fly across multiple maps and react to the situations and obstacles thrown at you. It’s all choreographed and executed beautifully.
Then there’s the hardware capabilities of the controller, which Rift Apart also takes full advantage of. Every gunshot, every footstep and basically everything that touches the character comes with a unique haptic feedback on the controller. Every weapon and ability has a unique feel on the controller’s adaptive triggers. Many of the animations in the game come with sounds from the speaker on the controller that compliment it nicely, and for the first time ever, I wasn’t tempted to turn down the volume on it.
The gunplay in the game is as fun as ever. Rift Apart follows the same winning formula as the rest of the series. Ratchet and Rivet have a large arsenal of powerful and creative guns on them and standing in their path is an army of enemies. Fights are action packed and fast paced as the player simultaneously dishes out tons of damage and dodges enemy attacks.
And that is where my praise for the game ends.
While it’s very impressive from a technological standpoint, when it comes to the writing and actual game design, Rift Apart has a seemingly endless list of issues.
First off, calling Rift Apart a full length game is a stretch. With about 10 levels, the game is only about 10-15 hours long. That in itself isn’t a problem; short games can still yield fulfilling experiences. Rift Apart, however, doesn’t.
Gameplay wise, there’s not much innovation. The enemies that you encounter at the start of the game are pretty much the same group of enemies you fight at the end of the game. There’s also little variety in gameplay. Outside of the aforementioned action sequences, you’re either shooting enemies as Ratchet/Rivet, shooting enemies as a little robot named Glitch or solving puzzles as Clank (and the puzzles aren’t anything special).
The writing doesn’t make up for it.
The story goes Dr. Nefarious, the reoccurring villain of the series, gets so sick of losing to Ratchet that he steals the dimensionator, a device capable of opening portals to alternate dimensions, and travels to a dimension where the dynamic is flipped. In this alternate dimension, Emperor Nefarious, Dr. Nefarious’ counterpart, always wins and Rivet, Ratchet’s counterpart, always loses.
It’s an interesting concept that’s completely squandered. Every character is essentially identical to their inter-dimensional counterpart. In fact, you wouldn’t even be aware of this whole dynamic if the game didn’t explicitly tell you every so often. Rivet is leading a rebellion against Emperor Nefarious that supposedly has been nothing but an endless struggle with zero success, but it certainly doesn’t seem like it; all we ever see her do is kick ass. Emperor Nefarious is supposedly much more competent than Dr. Nefarious, but all we ever see him do is struggle against Ratchet and Rivet as his overconfidence leads to his downfall. Supposedly, overuse of the dimensionator will lead to the collapse of the universe, but we never see evidence of that, we’re just told every so often that it’ll happen.
It’s possible the developers didn’t really care about the story and didn’t put much effort into it. If that’s the case though, then I would argue they must’ve not cared too much about the gameplay either.
The visual contrasts of the game are not good. Things that are important often look no different from things that are just decoration. Right out of the gate in the very first area, I struggled to differentiate enemies from civilians. I’ve had multiple instances in which I couldn’t figure out how to proceed only for the answer to be something like stand on some standard-looking platform that turned out to be an elevator, or interact with a standard-looking computer in the corner of the room. There’s a “high contrast” option in the menu that makes everything that isn’t important black and white, but why would I want that? The visuals are the game’s biggest strength.
The general pacing of the levels are also problematic. Simply going through the levels at a normal pace is enough to completely zoom past important dialogue. I found myself frequently stopping and going “wait, what am I supposed to be doing here?” My advice to anyone reading this is to go into the menu and set waypoints to always be on, as that makes it much easier to figure out what the game wants from you.
This problem is made worse once the player unlocks the hover boots, an item that allows them to move much more quickly. As the game became more tedious and uninteresting, I found myself using these hover boots more and more to just get through everything. This of course meant more dialogue being skipped. On a few occasions, I even accidentally skipped triggers that were necessary to help me proceed.
The controls feel a little stiff in various ways. Dodging (or phantom dashing as the game calls it) is slow and has an oddly long cooldown. The weapon wheel doesn’t come up right away when you press the triangle button; you have to hold it down for half a second. Jumping feels a bit finicky and precise platforming can become difficult. Teleporting using the rift tether is very slow and leaves you vulnerable for at least a full second.
Normally, holding down the X button is necessary to jump higher. However, when you hit a ramp with the hover boots and are propelled into the air, holding down X now all of the sudden forces you into a glide state, killing all of your speed and making you look very stupid. When the player unlocks the phantom dash, they have you use it to pass through a special barrier, then that barrier is never seen again until the very end of the game when you’ve completely forgotten how to get past it and have to look it up, making you look very stupid. In every single instance in which you use the hurlshot, you’re taken on a leap of faith in which you are guaranteed a safe landing somewhere, except for that one time in which you suddenly aren’t and are expected to phantom dash at the very end of the jump, and when you don’t do so you land in the kraken-filled waters below, killing you and once again making you look very stupid.
When I tried to set hover boots to “toggle” as opposed to “hold” in the menu (which I would prefer), I began running into a number of problems. Anytime I jumped with the hover boots, the game would kill all my momentum midair. The hover boots would also seem to suddenly activate even when I don’t press the button. When I swapped back to “hold”, all of these problems went away, effectively forcing me to to deal with “hold”. And this is just an issue I accidentally found; I can only imagine that if I were to explore and test the various other control and accessibility options in the menu I would find other issues.
I could go on and on with problems, but really it can all be summarized like this: the developers clearly focused their efforts on the technological stuff and to everything else said “eh, good enough”. After Rift Apart’s release, multiple developers took to Twitter to brag about how they faced no crunch whatsoever during the game’s development. Having played the game, the lack of crunch doesn’t surprise me one bit.
One might argue that sacrificing the quality of the game is worth it if it means keeping the developers mentally healthy. That’s a perfectly fair viewpoint, but it still means the game isn’t as good as it could’ve been.
Summary
In a vacuum, Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart is a good game. The visuals are fantastic and the gunplay is great, and those two things alone kept me going to the end. Beyond that though, Rift Apart begins to fall apart. There’s little innovation and variety, the story was poorly told and you could practically write a full book over all of the little issues in game design Rift Apart has. As a whole, it’s a disappointing start to the return of the series.