Last week, on a whim I bought Ratchet and Clank: Size Matters for the PS2, so I figured I’d write a little bit about each game in the series.

The Ratchet and Clank games are my favorite 3-D platformer series of the last console generation. I even like ’em better than Mario Sunshine! The first Jak and Daxter game was actually pretty good, but the next darker games in the series just ruined it. The Sly Cooper series was just the opposite. I didn’t like the first game in the Sly series because it felt too Crash Bandicoot-ish, but I’ve heard the second and third ones improved the gameplay tenfold. Yes, everyone has games that they never got around to playing even though they’re supposed to be good, and Sly 2 and 3 are two of those kinds of games for me. Other 3-D platformers like the Spyros and Crashes in the PS2 generation were less than memorable.

Speaking of Spyro, most of the Ratchet and Clank games were made by the same people who made the original Spyro the Dragon game (Insomniac), and you can tell. Both games have good camera angles and the way you pick up bolts/gems is nearly the same, too. Anyway, the basics in Ratchet and Clank games are pretty much all the same. You mostly play as Ratchet, a ‘lombax’ furry critter who likes to tinker with gadgets and weapons, that’s why he uses all those neat guns and things. His slightly nerdy robotic pal Clank mostly rides on Ratchet’s back like a backpack and helps him with jumps and stuff. Of course sometimes you can hop off his back and play solo missions with Clank, which involve a little more puzzle solving rather than the usual run and gun action. And so the duo goes off on interplanetary space adventures in each game.

The thing I like about most of the Ratchet and Clank games is the clever mix of gunplay and platforming. It’s about the closest thing to a 3-D classic Mega Man game you’ll get. Yes, the Mega Man Legends games were in 3-D (and great games, too), but they didn’t feel like Mega Man to me. Anyway, let’s take a little look at each game in the series:

Ratchet and Clank
Most everything in the first game was improved upon in the sequels, but as it stands, the first game is still pretty good. The storylines in each Ratchet game are pretty much the same, so I won’t go into them here. Usually the duo must save the galaxy by jumping over obstacles and blowing up any robots or aliens that get in their way. My friend let me borrow this one after it first came out, and when the price went down, I went out and bought it myself. Actually, I’ve never bought any of the Ratchet games when they first came out, I usually would wait until it was on sale or the price was low enough. The main thing I remember about the first game is that your energy meter was different, You had a set number of hits you could take, and while you could buy a couple more throughout the adventure, that’s usually all you had. I liked it better in the sequels when you could level up your energy bar to take more and more hits. Another slightly annoying thing about the first Ratchet game was at some points in the game, you’d have to buy a certain weapon to progress, and it would be super expensive. So you pretty much had to stop what you were doing and collect bolts for a while. Actually, most of the Ratchet games were like that, but it seemed more so in the first game.

Ratchet and Clank: Going Commando
The second game in the series is probably my favorite out of all of them. They made the right improvements to make the game more enjoyable. You could level up not only Ratchet, but your weapons could level up as well the more you use them. As you can tell by the title, Ratchet and Clank games have a slightly raunchy, tongue-in-cheek humor about them. My favorite instance of this in Going Commando is at the missile base level, there’s a tour guide with a group of robot tourists. You can go through the level and bypass the tour, or you can stick around and listen to all the funny stuff the guide says. And while the tour is going on, you’ll notice that critters are coming out and defeating stragglers in the tour group, so the group is noticably smaller at the end of the tour! You can earn Skill Points to unlock stuff, and one of the skill points you can get is to successfully protect the tour group from the aliens who try and get them! It’s hard! Finally, one of my favorite things about a couple of the R&C games happened first in Going Commando. There was a secret place you could go to that was like a replica of Insomniac’s offices. Here you could walk around and listen to behind the scenes comments by the makers, and play around with things that were taken out of the final game. One of the neat things that they said about this was some of the things they took out was because they weren’t very fun. I wish other game makers would do that, too!

Ratchet and Clank: Up Your Arsenal
Even though the third game had even more improvements, I didn’t like it as much as the second because it was the first game to feature online play, and at times it felt like they focused more on that than the one player experience. They even slapped the online levels into the one player game, so it felt less platformey and more gunplay-ish. And plus, by the end of the one player game, you could tell that Insomniac was getting kind of tired. It didn’t feel as inspired. But it’s still a very good game, though. The Insomniac museum came back, and one of my favorite things about the third game was the Captain Qwark 2-D levels. In each of the games, Captain Qwark is the anti-hero who gets in Ratchet’s way. Qwark’s kind of a cross between Buzz Lightyear and Homer Simpson. At certain points in Up Your Arsenal, you can play as Captain Qwark in classic style 2-D levels. I liked it when Qwark would ride a zip cord line and say “Whhheeeee-eee-eeeee…” all the way down!

Ratchet: Deadlocked
Daedlocked is the only game in the series I’ve never played much. It came out at the time when playing Halo online on the Xbox was super popular, and Sony wanted a piece of the action. So Deadlocked is a mostly online PS2 game that only stars Ratchet. The story in this one goes that Ratchet and Clank are captured and Ratchet is forced to compete in a deadly galactic game show style gladiator arena. Clank only gives tips from the sidelines. I played it at E3 once and felt that’s all I needed to see. They took out most of the charm and humor and the platformey gameplay with it. The only other Ratchet and Clank game I never played was a cell phone game that I hear was actually pretty good.

Ratchet and Clank: Tools of Destruction
The first R&C game on the PS3 is another one I don’t own (because I don’t have a PS3), but I have played it a few times over at a friend’s house who does have one. Ratchet & Clank is the only game on the PS3 that I have any interest in. Well, there is Bumpy Trot 2 (Steambot Chronicles sequel), but I doubt we’ll see that in the US anytime soon. At any rate, since I never paid full price for any other R&C title, I’m certainly not going to pay over 600 bucks just to play one PS3 game. Tools of Destruction is pretty much more of the same, almost overly so, and the Sixaxis motion controls on some of the weapons feels pretty tacked on (just like the Sixaxis controller itself), but it is still good Ratchet and Clank fun. And when reviewers say ‘Pixar quality graphics,’ they mean it!

Ratchet and Clank: Size Matters
Size Matters was originally for the PSP, but I got the PS2 version. Sometimes they port games from the PSP to PS2, like some of the GTA games, Twisted Metal, etc. There are two reasons why I got the PS2 version. One, I was curious as to how a PSP game would look on the PS2. Well the answer to that is it doesn’t look very good at all. It’s not as detailed, and even the first R&C game looks better than this. No improvments graphically from the PSP to PS2 at all. The other reason why I wanted this one on the PS2 was because in past games, you would strafe with the L2 button and adjust the camera with the right analog stick. Well how would you strafe and move the camera with the PSP version? There is no L2 button or right analog stick on the PSP. Size Matter is probably my least favorite of the R&C games because of the bad graphics and buggy gameplay that froze up on me in a few places. Plus the Giant Clank StarFox levels and hoverboard races sucked. If Insomniac had made this, they would’ve taken them out for not being fun. But there are a couple of unique things that I liked about Size Matters. One, the Clank challenge areas were kind of neat, with a Battlebots style arena and Lemmings style puzzle levels. And you could get different armor parts for Ratchet, and if you got a matching set, you could make his wrench have different attributes. And even though it’s not as good, it does have the run and gun fun of the previous titles. Just in smaller bites.

Secret Agent Clank
This one’s not even out yet. It’s a spinoff game starring Clank on the PSP. In the third game, Clank is so popular as a hero that he gets his own spy TV series (and Ratchet gets a little jealous). So in this game, you play as Clank as a spy. He has a cute little tuxedo and everything. I’m a little worried about this game, though, because one, it’s on the PSP, and two, because since it’s not really a Ratchet game, there’s more stealth gameplay. And I don’t really like stealth gameplay. But I do want to give this game a try anyway. Clank is cool. But I probably won’t pay full price for this one either. I’ll wait for it to be out for a while and the price goes down. Or maybe I’ll get to review it…

Should I Let My Kids Play Ratchet & Clank Games?
The R&C games are rated T but I consider them to be ‘fence’ games. You can definitely tell from some of the subtitles that there are some bits of slightly raunchy yet subtle humor in the games. But it’s nothing worse than The Simpsons. There is violence with lots of crazy guns and stuff. But no blood, only alien goo. And the violence is VERY cartoony. And there may be a bad word or two in each game. But me, personally, I would let just about any kid I know play these games, simply because I’d hate to deny them the great gameplay the R&C games offer. But I would probably supervise the younger ones. And because Ratchet and Clank are a team, there are a few good instances and lines in each game that promote friendship and teamwork. And that’s always a good thing.

So, do you like Ratchet and Clank games? Which ones are your favorites? Tell us!

Tags: Misc