ratchet and clank's dial ticks just a tad toward their cousins jak and daxter's level of edginess, finding a balance that allows them to remain fully recognizable as ratchet and clank while still having a more serious and realized plot. i LOVED the writing in this one. the gameplay was good too, acting as an obviously halo-inspired take on the annihilation nation challenges from up your arsenal.
confused by the random and not tone-fitting transphobic joke in the post-credits scene, though. what was up with that?

My Ratchet & Clank kinda-marathon continues with the first game I've actually bought off of Yahoo Auctions! I'd heard this title was a bit weird among R&C games and divisive among fans, and those impressions are what I walked away from it with as well. It took me a little under 8 hours (and an hour of that was grinding for the final boss) to beat the Japanese version of the game.

Ratchet: Deadlocked pics up where 3 left off, with Ratchet & Clank a part of Q-Force, when they're suddenly kidnapped by an intergalactic TV producer for Vox entertainment. He wants them to compete in his death battles among heroes, and Ratchet goes on a mission to both compete for his life and try and find a way to shut down Vox once and for all. That's right, just Ratchet. There's a reason Clank isn't even in the English title for the game, and that's because he's barely in it, and he never fights with you. Clank is your radio operator, effectively, telling you mission instructions which I never got most of because this game has virtually no subtitles (for some reason when the last two games got subtitles perfect), and the objectives are often self-explanatory enough that it didn't matter (expect for the times when they weren't very self-explanatory XP). Compared to even Ratchet & Clank 1, this game is pretty darn light on story, and feels almost unfinished in that regard. Apparently they were going for something a little more serious/edgy to compete with things like Halo that were getting popular at the time, but that was a serious swing and a miss here.

The gameplay of this entry is also really different from the previous games. It's more like if they made an entire game around the arena missions and ranger missions from the past two games. The game has a small hub area in the Vox station, but outside of that it's almost entirely menus picking different missions from menus that are usually vehicle trials, combat trials, or small platforming missions with lots of combat. All the platforming and paying for upgrades forward from previous games is totally gone, and there are a lot less overall weapons in this game as well.

A lot of the weapons are also just not very fun or just boring, and that hour of grinding I needed to do at the end of the game was to get the rocket launcher and a few other guns to a level good enough that I could use them to beat the final boss with. The default rifle-esque gun you start the game with is so good and upgrades so well, I just used that for almost the entire game. You have a couple of "battle bots" that flank you and will attack targets around you, but you have very limited control over them, they're sorta ham-fisted solutions for puzzles quite often (which just amounts to pressing a button on the D-pad to order them to do the thing), and they don't add much to the game at all. They seem more like a concession that there's too often too much going on to really pay attention to, so they're there to keep you from getting totally ganked by something outside of your line of sight (since you can die REALLY fast in this game if you aren't careful).

This game overall feels like a real step back in the gameplay department from the design to the mechanics themselves. Ratchet feels noticeably stiffer to move than in R&C3, and a bit slower too. And despite that, this game still has some pretty severe framerate issues. The vehicle sections are also absolutely dire to control and are all awful. That is especially weird after R&C3 had great vehicle sections, but this game manages to make everything past games' vehicle sections have done well worse in just about every regard. The one gold star I can award to this game is that they have finally gotten the auto-aim down right. It works great and it makes combat way way easier.

Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. Some people really do like the arena challenges in this game, and the game for the most part does play quite well, particularly in the combat sections, so I can't give it an outright "not recommended". That said, I think this is an even more skip-worthy entry than the first Ratchet & Clank, and most people would be better served these days just skipping right from R&C3 to R&C Future 1, because story-wise and mechanically you are barely missing anything with Ratchet: Deadlocked. This game's existence just seems to imply that Insomniac had no idea what made the first 3 games popular, or were just so self conscious about continuing to do what had worked so well that they made this weird footnote of a mainline R&C game.

“Ratchet: Gladiator” abandona la fórmula de acción, aventura y plataforma para centrarse únicamente en la acción pura y dura. Precisamente ese es su punto más fuerte y mejor implementado porque en el resto de apartados es muy inferior a su trilogía original. Ha sido como dos pasos atrás respecto a sus otras entregas.
Se nota que el juego era un experimento y que además tuvieron problemas con el desarrollo. Eso sí, Dallas y Juanita (Haters número 1 de Ratchet) nos dejaron muy buenos momentos.

Nota final: 7

Legitimately the best in my opinion of the PS2 Ratchet games. Unlike Up Your Arsenal, it's not trying to still pretend to be a shooter platformer. It makes itself very clear from the outset that this is a mission based third person shooter and as a result the combat is at its best in this game.

The weapons sandbox is a lot smaller than the previous games but as a result you get a high level of experimentation with the weapons Omega and Alpha Mod systems and weapon level ups take quite longer.

The addition of two NPC friendly combatants you control at the push of the button also greatly enhances the pace of the combat. It gets hectic but it's insanely fun.

Also David Beauregard's soundtrack in this. Holy shit. He's at his absolute best and the songs are all insane bangers, it almost made me lose focus on combat just from bopping to it.

If I did have any complaints, I feel that both the settings are a bit drab and has less impact or variety as the worlds in the previous trilogies. There's also the vehicle combat. The usefulness and fun ranges from being better off on foot to "more please".

But honestly I find those complaints rather small because the main gameplay loop itself of the combat is so good and satisfying. This right here is the peak of Ratchet combat. It makes me want another one of these. Perhaps the next one after Rift Apart, if that ever happens considering what was found out in the Insomniac leaks.

"Heroes never die, they keep coming back as re-runs!"

Mindless gonzo combat as an analog for scathing potshots at manufactured celebrity - a much more resonant theme now than on release - they made you, and will turn on you in an instant for being exactly what they created you to be. Unquestionably a downgrade from the previous games though, Ratchet is barely an entity in this and you can't even play as Clank - but boy does this do the whole forced 2000s grit cringe WAY better than Jak II and III. In fact this whole thing feels like a predictor of the gaming generation to come - with an emphasis on fleeting short-attention-span gameplay over depth, so you can crank out these missions (in dull, empty environments) as fast as possible without having to really think about it. But it's also reasonably fun at doing that, plus the story is loaded with searing social satire and is absolutely fucking hilarious to boot (Dallas and Juanita ftw). PS3 port is rife with visual glitches and framerate drops. Grindrail sections are HOT ass. Had a good time with it no doubt, but also really glad they got this out of their system.

Genuinely shocked with how much I loved this game this time around. Ratchet's arsenal is a bit stripped down in this one, but that allows every single weapon its time to shine, each one of them staying useful for the duration of the adventure. It was easy as a kid to be disappointed in this game, but allowing myself to separate it from the original trilogy has made me realize that the mission-based, combat-focused gameplay of Deadlocked is genuinely impressive, and an absolute blast to tear through. A bit on the short side, and the vehicle sections/missions are a bit lacking, but I'm happy to say that this was a pleasant surprise to revisit.

I'd say it's the second strongest entry in the series after the first one.

Insomniac was moving toward a focus on action in their mascot action-platformer series, and I found their attempts at this grindy and irritating in the second and third games while also compromising the platforming to create shooter arenas. Deadlocked does away with the pretension, and focuses on polishing this action instead. I think the gameplay benefits tremendously from stripping down the overdone arsenal of the previous games to 10 useful and highly customizable weapons instead. The side distractions of vehicle time-trials, shooting-galleries, and gimmick combat-events also seem better thought out and polished.

I personally don't have any complaints with it, but it is a very short game that heavily relied on its multiplayer functionality as a value proposition. Not deducting any points for that, but just a heads up.

I give it a strong 3/5.