EABOF: Ratchet and Clank (2016 game review)

Welcome boys and girls. Just got this game Sunday, already beat it because I binged it. I sat the hell down and completed it (Mostly) in about 12 hours. So, was it worth the forty dollars? Let's take a look.


1. Plot:
The plot of this game is that Captain Qwark is in jail, and telling a story to another character, Shiv Helix (Who didn't exist before this game, we'll get back to that later). This being the plot, you hear some of the narration while playing. This becomes annoying on occasion when it repeats itself. Otherwise, it's fine and sometimes it's pretty funny. Basically, the plot is the first game with some little Easter eggs hinting at the later ones, and some big straight up references. For example, (And seriously, I'll be spoiling loads, don't like it? Move on until the last sentence.) Dr. Nefarious is in this game. Not as the genocidal robot we all know and love, but as an organic life form, working with the original game's antagonist, Chairman Drek.

Now, the plot of this game takes more turns then that. Here are the changes in the order I recall them:
1. Ratchet lives under a guy he calls "Grim", a purple dude with tusks. 
2. There are more Galactic Rangers shown than Qwark, totaling four, three at first. (We'll get back to that in section 4) In the original, it was only Qwark.
3. Drek's Robot Lieutenant has been replaced with an actually somewhat threatening character, Victor Von Ion, big, imposing, seems like a boss fight waiting to happen.
4. Drek says more or less outright that his father's company is the one that made the Blarg homeworld so polluted whereas in the first, it being exclusively his company was only revealed at the very end.
6. Dr. Nefarious is in this and working with Drek, as said before.
There are TONS more. If you've played the games, this one is an interesting alternate version of the first game, at least in the story and some of the new gameplay aspects... Speaking of:

2. Gameplay:
The game plays as you might expect a RAC game to, in other words for non-players, that means a third-person shooter starring a fuzzball, his talking robot backpack, and their crazy guns. It keeps the upgrade tree system from Crack In Time, IE, collect a resource (This is the same as the last two, raritanium) and you can use one unit at a time to upgrade certain aspects of your gun, for example, range, raritanium gained from its use, Bolts (In game currency for buying guns and ammunition) gained from its use, etc.. Also, there are some ship missions and hoverboard races too. Fun stuff. But there's a new element to it, those others were from other games in the series. This new thing is... TRADING CARDS! Yup. 

The cards are an interesting sub-thing in the game. You can find three packs of them by wondering, single cards by beating in alien faces, and... Well... We'll talk about the third part of the card thing in a bit. Basically though, if you complete a set of cards, usually coming in sets of three, you get a perk, so, for example, complete one set, you get a five percent increase in the amount of raritanium received in combat, or bolts, or, in fact, more "Holo-cards" as they're called. Get this, all but one set consists of three cards, get all three, the perk is unlocked. And if you get 5 "Duplicate cards" (Determined by the game by process of I don't really know) you can trade them all for one new card, so, can't find one in a set? trade five of your duplicates for one. Though I do have a nit-pick about one set, we'll get to that in part 4. Something else about the cards, there's a nine set, collect all nine, and bring them to a dude, and he will give you the RYNO's new model... which is basically a minigun that also shoots rockets. Simple, but kinda cool, it just doesn't quite feel on par with the weapons of previous games... speaking of... 

3. Weapons:
This game has a nasty habit of recycling weapons from previous Ratchet and Clank Games. Seriously, all but two weapons are from previous games, There's the Combuster, I.E. Pistol from Tools of Destruction. The Fusion Grenade from TOD, Quest for Booty, and Into the Nexus. The Pyrociter, I.E. Flamethrower from the original game (New model though). Plasma Striker, I.E. Sniper from Crack In Time and Into the Nexus. Nexus had more than two unique guns at least, and the "RYNO" is just a recycled model in this installment. Our unique Guns for this game are an area of effect deployment thing called the Proton Drum, Which when thrown out, emits damaging pulses. Then there's the Pixelizer. This game's Shotgun with something extra fun. You fire it and your foes turn into 2D Sprites. Assuming they're still moving, the sprite continues to generate itself. So let's say you shoot an enemy from the front and he survives, try going to his side and the sprite will appear as his side, it kind of pans across him though... you have to see this gun in action to wrap your head around how it works. But yeah, That's it. The rest are recycled and some of them look Janky as all get-out, like the Sheepinator looks completely different, and in a bad way, it's trying to make itself look kind of like the Winterizer from Into the Nexus, but the beam is loads thinner, that's the fun of the Sheepinator and similar guns throughout the series, the beam is this wide, swaying thing that pings from target to target, here, it's this narrow thing that you have to aim. 

4. Nitpicks and complaints I don't know where else to put:
Now, I'm gonna talk about the rewards you get for collecting stuff, cards, gold bolts, etc. So one or two little spoilers, otherwise, it's just me whining. 

1. For collecting gold bolts in this game, you can get pretty much anything, cheats, Masks, Camera filters, replacemnts for bolts, etc... So that means Skill points are gone. Skill points, for those not familiar with either the idea, or this game series' use of them, were these things you'd get for doing cool stuff. Clear example, beat Chain Blade in RAC Going Commando using only your wrench. Or in the first game, you destroyed a Qwark statue and got a skill point for that. You find and try to smash that same statue/robot in this game and nothing happens to it. It just asks if you were expecting some extra points, frankly, yes. I WAS. Just putting gold bolts in the game was a misstep, I feel, as all of your unlocks are mapped to them, so you wanna change your Armor's color? Game initially says "X amount of Gold Bolts." But no, that only unlocks the first one of the custom colors, the rest are unlocked as you collect, admittedly, this fuels you to want to see things get unlocked. If I just got eight and unlocked all the bolt skins as opposed to getting eight, then ten, then thirteen or whatever, is it would have been less rewarding and less compelling to see what the alternate bolts or the masks were... speaking of masks!

2. There are no skins, only "masks" They just plonk a random head on Ratchet's body, quarterassing something that originally was really impressive. To put it in perspective: Originally, when the skins where a thing, They made an entire new body for Ratchet, He didn't just have a Snowman's head, he was a snowman with sticks for arms (Many RAC games). He didn't just have a bucket on his head, He was a kid dressing up as Reactor (Deadlocked). Now, it's just a pointless thing on his head. It looks stupid. I mean, the others were ridiculous, but this just looks dumb in a way that isn't even goofy, there's no feeling of cohesiveness, and they don't even have Earholes. Lombaxes have great big cat ear things. Why don't these "masks" have holes for those?

3. This game's habit of recycling is ANNOYING. For example, The Fungoids From Crack in time and the Tharpods from All 4 One. Those games were pretty, but it undercuts both of those games. The Fungoids were supposed to have abandoned technology after they screwed up the gift of time travel that their GOD gave them, and the Tharpods were never in anything except all 4 one. Then there's the Insomniac Museum, in Crack in Time, it was a giant gameplay section of its own. You had to figure out little puzzles to open doors, you got to interact with stuff, read about "Oh, this was a canned boss." In this one? No. They straight up Use old character and asset models (You can tell, way lower res in most if not all cases) and just kinda plonked those into a warehouse, no context, except for one room. It's a video room. Cutscenes from the game, a reveal trailer, and some commercials for Going Commando from Japan. I think the most annoying thing is the old guns on display that are just AROUND, you can't pick any of them up either. That'd be going the extra mile. I'd love to use the Walloper in this new game.

4. One of the sets of Holo-cards is labeled as "Girl power" I couldn't find the middle card after like six hours of killing stuff and pack collecting. The other two were Angela Cross from Going Commando, a character I like because she's a badass, and Talwyn Apogee from TOD, Quest for Booty, Crack In Time, and Into The Nexus, again, kind of a badass character. I was expecting the Middle card to be Sasha Phyronix, Captain of the Starship Phoenix in Up Your Arsenal, Woulda fit. But NO. They screwed up twice here. Screw up one, it's one of the news lady robots. Screw up two, They made her look like Juanita from Deadlocked but say that it's Darla Gratch from the first three games. They look RADICALLY different, too, it's not "Well, they're just painted different from one another" No. Juanita was thinner, had less of a gunmetal pigment to her "Skin", they had different duds, and different hair. If you're going to make a character look like someone from YOUR GAME FRANCHISE'S HISTORY, make sure name matches. Also, Dallas, Juanita's co-Anchor on Dreadzone was in the same single cut scene "Darla" appears in. He even speaks. So that annoys me.

5. SPOILERS!!!!!!! At the end of the game, things collapse into themselves a few times. A character gets turned into a sheep preceding gameplay, but still makes an announcement over an intercom when the gameplay starts again. There's a part where a character gets caught in an airlock before chasing Clank, but you don't see him free himself. He's stuck in the cutscene and then suddenly he's running after you. This part takes place on something the then-captain of the ship calls "The Phoenix" Which bares NO resemblance to the one from Up your arsenal and Deadlocked. And the cherry on top is that this is Qwark telling the original story of the original game. Half of this crap didn't happen. Like, again, It was Just Qwark in the first game. There was no Doctor Nefarious, Drek was not turned into a Sheep! THAT GUN DIDN'T EVEN EXIST YET! Sorry... But seriously, it doesn't make sense. If this was a reboot being told by Qwark's narration, which seems to ACTUALLY be what it is, as opposed to Qwark telling the story of the first game VERY incorrectly, I'd be less annoyed. And also, why is Qwark in Jail? The ending suggests that this is in fact, the same universe as the story Qwark told, but again, there are loads of changes to the story, but official sources are like "Oh, he's retelling things a bit." But that makes no sense, Qwark's ego is massive, He wouldn't add people that weren't there and has, in fact, given himself all the glory for some of the crap Ratchet's done.

6. SPOILERS HERE, TOO!, BUT ONLY AT THE VERY END OF WHAT I'M SAYING!!! (If you've played the first game, keep reading, I guess) Simply put, the voice actress who did Cora did a really bad job. it's like she's trying to act badly. The clips in the game from the movie are fine, but she's just annoying in the actual gameplay segments, I thought her talking like that was gonna lead up to a twist where she's working with Drek and Qwark, never happened.

7. ONE MORE BIG HUGE SPOILER!!! That guy I mentioned earlier who replaces Drek's lieutenant? Victor Von Ion is his name, he chases Clank twice and we never see him again. Yeah, he was just some warbot, but he was a lieutenant! You get that way by being built badder than the rest, yet, you never fight him, you just run twice and short him out with a sprinkler system.

5. Graphics

This game is so pretty. Seriously, if this game was a woman, it'd be Miss MULTIVERSE, there is the occasional clipping issue, and like I said, they just reuse some old weapon and Character models from the first games and those look Janky as hell, too... But otherwise, it's wonderful. The character models and Textures are really pretty when they aren't the reused ones, and there's something fun I like that ties into this, you can add screen Filters and change what the bolts look like. They can be Coins, Spheres, and I'm not kidding, the Rupees from Zelda. They look just like them, that brought me endless joy.

6. Final thoughts/verdict:

The game isn't the longest RAC. This is partly due to them removing Skill points, those add to the game, trying to do them over and over. But otherwise, I'd say give it try if it's your first RAC game, if you've played almost any of the others, it's not really worth the $40 asking price, partly because there's a pervasive sense of Laziness and just... I don't know how to explain it, there's just a general feeling of offness, like something crazy happened in your room while you were gone, but you don't know what, you just know it was intense.

I seriously can't tell if the studio was being lazy, cheap, or they just had to rush things, overall though, the game is still kinda fun.

Verdict: Don't buy this game unless you find it on the cheap. 

Ce-web-rity quote/Paraphrase: "This is the perfect example of a game absolutely destroyed by (The developers turning into lazy dicks)." -Projared, top 10 word games of 2015, the game in question was Evolve.