All in all, Ratchet & Clank's single-player mode will keep you busy for well over 10 hours, especially if you devote yourself to completing all the optional challenges. The game tosses a handful of combat scenarios at you throughout the course of the storyline. These operations are broken up into multiple parts, and in them, you'll be fighting alongside a set of boneheaded robots as they fight to drive out the enemy horde. Objectives vary from mission to mission, so you'll be guarding bridges, using a turret to shoot down dropships, flying in a hovership to gain air superiority, and so on. You'll also be given the opportunity to compete in a Running Man-like game show called Annihilation Nation. While you'll have to visit the show for story-related reasons, you can also go back to compete in a series of challenges. Some of them just task you with surviving multiple waves of enemies, but others put different spins on the action by restricting you to one weapon, giving you a time limit, and so on. These missions may be optional, but they're pretty fun, and, more importantly, they give you a lot of bolts, which represent the currency used to purchase things like new armor and weapons.

If you have old saves on your memory card, you can score some old weapons on the cheap.

Ratchet & Clank has always controlled well, but with an even more intense focus on combat, some additional options were necessary. Now, you can swap to a first-person mode or a strafe-locked, third-person mode that controls more like a shooter than a platformer. This is really handy for some of the game's arena sequences and for some of its other parts, where you're going to be shooting lots of things for a long time. But where these options really come in handy is in the multiplayer mode.

While the single-player feels, at times, like a mission pack for Ratchet & Clank 2 instead of an entirely new adventure, the "all-new" development efforts clearly went into Up Your Arsenal's multiplayer component. It allows you to play games in three different modes. Deathmatch and capture the flag are pretty standard takes on pretty standard modes. Siege mode is the most involved of the three. It's essentially a smaller-scale take on Unreal Tournament 2004's onslaught mode. The team-based game gives each side a base and populates the rest of the map with a series of neutral nodes. Capturing a node, which is done by using your wrench to turn a gigantic bolt at the center of each one, puts that outpost's turret on your side, and it also delivers occasional items and vehicles. You can also spawn from any node that your team controls, should you die. The object is to destroy the opposing team's base defenses, make your way inside its base, and destroy its power source. Doing so ends play. While siege mode won't feel too new to players who have played the similar mode in UT2004, this is the first time such a mode has found its way on to the PlayStation 2. You can play the multiplayer on a four-way split-screen--if you have a multitap--but this pales in comparison to the eight-way matches that are possible online. The online mode has a good number of options overall, and the game does a great job with stat-tracking. The multiplayer gameplay itself isn't the deepest mode in the world, since a great deal of the on-foot combat strategy boils down to doing sideways strafe jumps to avoid getting hit, but it's definitely fun and brings some additional variety to the game.

Graphically, Ratchet & Clank continues to be a series that brings out the best in the PlayStation 2 hardware. While some of the more extreme explosions cause some slowdown, Up Your Arsenal usually stays right up around the 60-frames-per-second mark, delivering some nice, smooth action. The character models all look great, and in the cutscenes, they animate and express very, very well. The bright, colorful look permeates each of its environments, and, generally speaking, the game looks absolutely superb, from top to bottom. It also has support for widescreen displays and progressive scan setups, which enhances the look of the game, but not dramatically.

Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal's progressive scan support makes the game look a little cleaner.

Up Your Arsenal does a superb job with its sound effects, too. Many of these effects return from the previous offerings, but the weapon sound effects have a great amount of punch to them, making them sound even more powerful than some of them really are. The cutscenes are heavy on the voice work, and the actors and actresses that deliver lines all do some excellent work here, which really helps to make the story more entertaining.

Fitting a team-based shooter into a platformer might not seem like a great fit at first, but when taken as a total package, Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal is a truly great game. The single-player action is true to the previous entries in the series, almost to a fault, while the multiplayer mode is a fun diversion that adds a lot of replay value to an otherwise one-time adventure. If you're a fan of the series, there's plenty more to see here, but even if you're just getting started with the Ratchet & Clank games, Up Your Arsenal's full feature list makes it a great place to start.