It is usually unwise to play a sequel without playing the previous games, especially when plot events and characters are carried over. The ending of Halo 3, without Halo, is just another driving level and I would not have understood Silent Hill 3 without having first played Silent Hill. This is what I expected from Ratchet and Clank Future; I have not played any of the previous four titles. All I knew them for were good reviews, good demos and thinly veiled phallic names (Size Matters, Ha!), and I expected to be punished for my lazy, elitist gaming habits. Thankfully Insomniac saw fit to make their second PS3 outing an excellent game in its own right, and instead of alienating me for having missed the early iterations, it has sent me on a quest to find and add them to my collection.
Right around the PS2 launch, Sony promised “Toy Story quality visuals rendered in real time.” Like many things that Sony says, this never came true. It never really even came close. Flash forward to the PS3, and this long-forgotten promise has finally been fulfilled. Ratchet and Clank Future is easily one of the best looking PS3 games to date. Its quality does not rest in excruciating (and usually fleeting) detail, but in the overall polish and look of the game. Ratchet’s world is visually and audibly seamless. It has the look and feel of a Pixar film, minus the talking cars and cooking rats. Add some sweet weapons and bolt collecting to Monsters, Inc., then swap Clank for the talking eyeball thing and this game is the beautiful, bastard child.
Ratchet and Clank Future also distills the prequels down into a single game that is solid from beginning to end. As the previous titles went on, wandering further from their platform roots and growing more complicated, they decreased in quality. More did not always mean better. Like many multiple sequel games (Twisted Metal, Burnout, Gran Turismo, etc) Ratchet and Clank hit the sweet spot around two or three. Future leaves behind the deathmatch-heavy Deadlocked for the finely-tuned platforming with big guns that was previously successful. Mario, if he were a member of some future NRA and had a tail, would be proud. The level design is solid, rewarding careful exploration without being tedious, and even unlocking more when returning with newly purchased weapons.
The ‘more is not always better’ issue does crop up occasionally, and one major problem is indeed the sheer number of weapons. Not all of them are useful, and a few are drastically overpowered, especially once they are leveled up. It would be quite tempting to blow through the entire game using the guided missiles, and that tactic would be successful right up to the first real boss encounter. Bosses force careful ammunition rationing, and are difficult enough that having each weapon leveled up a few times helps a great deal. They are a welcome, if drastic, jump in difficulty to an otherwise easy game.
In the end, the PS3 may have finally gotten what the average Heavenly Sword and unfortunate Lair failed to deliver: a solid, mass-market, exclusive title. There is much untapped potential in the PS3, and only Insomniac has managed to coax it out thus far. It has become difficult to choose which future sequel to anticipate more: Resistance 2 (Even More Brown) or Ratchet and Clank Future Future (Here’s Hoping for a Wii joke). My money’s on the lombax.
