Having now played all three of the trio of platforming games for the PS2, Ratchet& Clank, Sly Cooper, and Jax & Daxter, I can safely say that Ratchet & Clank is the weakest of them all. Look, the game itself isn’t really bad per say, but there certainly isn’t anything grabbing about it. Everything in this game is just almost, but not quite with it. The story is there, but it certainly does have a very formulaic and somewhat forced funny side to it. The combat is there, but it’s often sluggish and hard to control. The music is there, but it’s mostly drowned out by the SFX noises. The platforming is there, and well, actually the platforming is probably the best part of Rachet & Clank honestly. Just a lot of Ratchet & Clank felt like they had it going for them, and just kinda dropped the ball somewhere.
Please don’t take these comments as such a threat to a series mind you, I’m well aware that it gets better and that its formula works well. Much of the game is still the same kind of platformer I remember growing up with, but with a lot of extra toys that are throw in to help spice up gameplay. You still visit different levels or planets in this case, you still find your main objectives, you still have collectibles, and you still have secrets to unlock while playing the game. That’s really about it. I suppose the fault I actually have with Ratchet & Clank is that it’s just rather average. Save for the weapons you actually get throughout; you’re really just playing another platformer. A lot of the weapons are neat and interesting, but they never really do much to make an impact on the game. I was using my wrench the majority of the time just hitting enemies like I normally do because frankly it was just easier to deal with. The weapons that you get, while more powerful than the wrench, are simply too difficult to really deal with. Aiming simply isn’t that easy while being shot at and without a sidestep or strafing it just means I have to take a moment to adjust my view, fire and hope it hits, then dodge. Such work is just too much the majority of the time, and the wrench is simply better at handling most problems you’re dealing with because it doesn’t use ammo.
The major thing I have to really complain about though is the constant need to go back and forth between worlds. While I can easily agree with the idea that R&C doesn’t make you back track a lot during the missions, I disagree that R&C has little backtracking. In fact, I say that a lot of the game is devoted to going back and forth between planets just to find new paths because you acquired a new item. It’s not so much that it feels like bad level design or anything of the sort, but it’s just a constant thing that happens and it gets annoying seeing the same loading screen, err, ship again and again. I like to just get everything in a level and be done with it and move on, but for the majority part of R&C you’re always coming back to find more stuff if you want to 100% it. Also the music selection in the game is just rather disappointing; from what could have been really good sci-fi action music ends up being just a few notes of bleeps and boops that loop incorrectly. Perhaps the biggest problem I have with the music though is the fact that the boss battles aren’t reflected in them. Nothing just really feels big in Rachet & Clank and that just makes me wish there was. It’s a game that could have had it all, but it just fails to build up all the way there, and they had all the tools for it too.
Final Thoughts:
Rachet & Clank is so close to being something really awesome, but it just never quite makes it there. Everything is almost with it, and while it’s a decent platformer in its own right, the game itself needs a lot of fixes with combat and atmosphere to make it really stand out. Thankfully this is only the start of a series and not what the series has become, and if this is its starting point, I’m sure it will get better.