Before I begin, I do want to point out that Pangburn and poyfuh also discuss most of the mechanical problems that I go over in this review. Man... this was rough. Maybe it's partly my fault because I felt the need to rush through it for the final stint of L2AGO, but I didn't think it would be this bad. A quick note here: I played through the first level of the original Ratchet & Clank many years ago but never progressed past that for some reason (I think I just forgot to go back to it), and so the first Ratchet & Clank game I ever cleared was Rift Apart. My experience is definitely colored from 100%ing the newest game in the series first, so keep that in mind.
The original Ratchet & Clank in my mind suffers from two glaring problems. The first is that combat, to put it bluntly, does not work. One of the main draws of Ratchet & Clank is that you have a bunch of cool weaponized gadgets to work with to systematically eliminate hordes of different enemies, and combat comprises of both hack and slash (using the wrench) and 3D platform based aiming/shooting. There's no way to block damage; you have to dodge attacks by strafing or jumping out of the way. But you don't get strafing to begin with (and strafing's implementation is not amazing either, I'll get to that in a bit), so as a result, most of combat involves turning to face enemies to shoot with auto aim, then turning around to dodge attacks, and then turning back around to shoot again. You can't just jump in place to dodge attacks either because most enemies will fire enough shots (or there will be enough enemies near you) to where lasting/lingering hitboxes will end up damaging you anyways. It's for this reason that abusing jump + wrench slam isn't 100% foolproof either. There are often just too many enemies, and targeting them while trying to dodge attacks is a nightmare. Also, trying to hack and slash all your enemies with the wrench alone becomes unreliable as soon as enemies start taking more than one hit to kill; you'll get swarmed within seconds and will probably take damage. So, you've got your pick between auto-aim on the run ranged combat, unreliable long lasting end-lag hack and slash combat, or cheesing combat altogether by playing the game like some kind of first person shooter and outranging enemies to begin with and taking them out with first person scope blaster/missile launcher/remote rockets. The latter option is your most reliable combat option unfortunately (and you can't do this too up close, otherwise the enemies get privy and will interrupt you while you're in first person scope; remember that it gets quite unwieldy having to switch back and forth between the perspectives and dodging/positioning vs aiming, so bypassing this by sniping enemies is the safest way to go), and this turns combat into somewhat of a tedious exercise. This is further exacerbated when you start fighting commandos in the final few chapters that will somehow figure out your location no matter how far away you were when you shot them down with remote rockets, so you have to spend two cycles dodging bullets from them before resuming your attack. And finally, you may end up doing this more often anyways for aerial opponents because auto-aim doesn't always lock onto them while you're on the ground. Perhaps I may sound a little anachronistic saying this, but compare this to Rift Apart, where the game instantly locks you into a 3rd person over the shoulder shooter perspective as soon as you press the trigger, so you can easily strafe and aim adjust at the same time. It's just a much cleaner solution; you'll eventually get strafing by double tapping the right trigger and holding down L2 or R2 (but at the cost of constantly hovering) but with no lock strafing, and that definitely did not click with me unlike the newer games.
The other big issue with the original Ratchet & Clank is the pacing. The checkpoints are by far the biggest culprit here; it's often quite hard to tell where the checkpoints are located and how far you'll be sent back if you die. Sometimes I lost 5 minutes of progress when I died, and sometimes I lost 20 minutes or more. Keep in mind that the enemies will respawn if you die, but your ammo (and your money, if you spent any via PDA/vending boxes before dying) will not. This, as well as the general lack of respawning boxes unless you fly off the planet, means that you'll often be at a deficit of funds to even purchase all the guns, much less buy more ammo for certain enemies, and money grinding itself becomes even more of a slog. I also felt that there was a certain lock & key element to the enemies and some of the weapons that's somewhat emphasized; for example, the floating mine enemies on Gaspar have to be taken out with the Walloper (you could try and kill them with the Bomb Glove or Pyrociter, but aiming at them up close is pretty hard), and the Walloper I feel is not worth one of your eight slots otherwise when the wrench handles more or less the same function outside of that one enemy. Similarly, most flying enemies are best taken out with the missile launcher/remote rockets, and the giant blimps that spawn commandos could only be taken out with remote rockets from my experience. So there's this awkward glut of enemies that I felt had to be taken out with specific weapons, and this resulted in a lot of my weapons feeling kind of redundant while I constantly ran out of ammo for the weapons I needed. I'd like to say that you'll get what you need from the ammo crates to make up for the reliance upon certain weapons, but the number of times I got Pyrociter or Repeater ammo when I really needed more missiles has led me to believe otherwise.
The final boss is emblematic of everything that I think has gone horribly wrong with the game. Essentially, you fight this giant flying robot that is launching missiles and mines at you; your best weapon here is the Devastator (the missile launcher), which you can mostly get away with by occasionally looking at the flying robot and shooting before having to jump/run away to dodge. You won't have enough time to stop and aim with most of your other weapons. Because there are multiple phases here, I had to stop inbetween phases to buy more weapons using the PDA, which is an optional collectible found before the boss fight that also charges extra as a "surcharge" for convenience. (If you haven't found the PDA by then, you're basically locked into the final boss and won't be able to gather additional ammo for the Destructor... oof.) Now, because the developers must have noticed that there was a pretty big possibility that you would run out of money by/during the final phase (which I absolutely did), there's another form of dealing damage by using the Suck Cannon to inhale the mines/drones that are sent your way and shoot them towards the damage spongy boss. But this actually further complicates things, because you not only have to find openings to switch your weapons from the hotbar if you don't want to go into the menu every time (Rift Apart slows down time as you switch weapons from the hotbar, but not here), you also have to deal with the presence of mines and drones acting as targets for auto aim. So if you were trying to bypass this altogether and just invest in rockets to shoot down the boss (because hit and run combat with the suck cannon is not incredible without aiming), today's your unlucky day because the game can't distinguish between the giant floating boss robot and the numerous mines/drones that are spawned and will often divert rockets to hit those instead of the boss! All of this by the way, is creating tons of objects on screen, so my game lagged constantly until the final boss decided it was time to wipe out all the extraneous enemies with his own attack, since I didn't have time to focus and pick off every single minion. And if you die, you get spawned back to right before the final phase of the boss, but without any money or extra ammo to use! Needless to say, this was the worst final boss that I had fought in a hot minute, and I had to further lower my score just for this boss alone.
I sincerely do not mean to be needlessly disparaging towards this childhood classic for many; most of the elements for a great game are here! The visuals and soundtrack still hold up, there's some pretty witty dialogue between all the characters with a simple yet solid evolution of Ratchet & Clank's relationship, the movement isn't great at first but with the stretch jump, becomes much more satisfying, and for once, the minigames/side modes are all pretty fun! (Except for the turret section... seriously, why does every 3D platformer feel the need to have some kind of rail shooter/turret section?) But this is nevertheless one of the most disappointing experiences I have had with a 3D platformer recently, especially when compared to future entries in the series. Ratchet & Clank felt like it was constantly demanding perfection from me, prioritizing health as a key resource when enemies were abound and crowd control aiming was nigh upon difficult, and dying felt like a punishment due to both how much progress I lost and how much money and ammo I could not easily regain. I can't in good faith recommend this to most 3D platformer enthusiasts who are looking for a polished and well rounded game due to how time-consuming and strenuous combat felt; hopefully Going Commando proves my misgivings of the early franchise outings wrong, as I've heard it fixes many of the flaws found here.
The original Ratchet & Clank in my mind suffers from two glaring problems. The first is that combat, to put it bluntly, does not work. One of the main draws of Ratchet & Clank is that you have a bunch of cool weaponized gadgets to work with to systematically eliminate hordes of different enemies, and combat comprises of both hack and slash (using the wrench) and 3D platform based aiming/shooting. There's no way to block damage; you have to dodge attacks by strafing or jumping out of the way. But you don't get strafing to begin with (and strafing's implementation is not amazing either, I'll get to that in a bit), so as a result, most of combat involves turning to face enemies to shoot with auto aim, then turning around to dodge attacks, and then turning back around to shoot again. You can't just jump in place to dodge attacks either because most enemies will fire enough shots (or there will be enough enemies near you) to where lasting/lingering hitboxes will end up damaging you anyways. It's for this reason that abusing jump + wrench slam isn't 100% foolproof either. There are often just too many enemies, and targeting them while trying to dodge attacks is a nightmare. Also, trying to hack and slash all your enemies with the wrench alone becomes unreliable as soon as enemies start taking more than one hit to kill; you'll get swarmed within seconds and will probably take damage. So, you've got your pick between auto-aim on the run ranged combat, unreliable long lasting end-lag hack and slash combat, or cheesing combat altogether by playing the game like some kind of first person shooter and outranging enemies to begin with and taking them out with first person scope blaster/missile launcher/remote rockets. The latter option is your most reliable combat option unfortunately (and you can't do this too up close, otherwise the enemies get privy and will interrupt you while you're in first person scope; remember that it gets quite unwieldy having to switch back and forth between the perspectives and dodging/positioning vs aiming, so bypassing this by sniping enemies is the safest way to go), and this turns combat into somewhat of a tedious exercise. This is further exacerbated when you start fighting commandos in the final few chapters that will somehow figure out your location no matter how far away you were when you shot them down with remote rockets, so you have to spend two cycles dodging bullets from them before resuming your attack. And finally, you may end up doing this more often anyways for aerial opponents because auto-aim doesn't always lock onto them while you're on the ground. Perhaps I may sound a little anachronistic saying this, but compare this to Rift Apart, where the game instantly locks you into a 3rd person over the shoulder shooter perspective as soon as you press the trigger, so you can easily strafe and aim adjust at the same time. It's just a much cleaner solution; you'll eventually get strafing by double tapping the right trigger and holding down L2 or R2 (but at the cost of constantly hovering) but with no lock strafing, and that definitely did not click with me unlike the newer games.
The other big issue with the original Ratchet & Clank is the pacing. The checkpoints are by far the biggest culprit here; it's often quite hard to tell where the checkpoints are located and how far you'll be sent back if you die. Sometimes I lost 5 minutes of progress when I died, and sometimes I lost 20 minutes or more. Keep in mind that the enemies will respawn if you die, but your ammo (and your money, if you spent any via PDA/vending boxes before dying) will not. This, as well as the general lack of respawning boxes unless you fly off the planet, means that you'll often be at a deficit of funds to even purchase all the guns, much less buy more ammo for certain enemies, and money grinding itself becomes even more of a slog. I also felt that there was a certain lock & key element to the enemies and some of the weapons that's somewhat emphasized; for example, the floating mine enemies on Gaspar have to be taken out with the Walloper (you could try and kill them with the Bomb Glove or Pyrociter, but aiming at them up close is pretty hard), and the Walloper I feel is not worth one of your eight slots otherwise when the wrench handles more or less the same function outside of that one enemy. Similarly, most flying enemies are best taken out with the missile launcher/remote rockets, and the giant blimps that spawn commandos could only be taken out with remote rockets from my experience. So there's this awkward glut of enemies that I felt had to be taken out with specific weapons, and this resulted in a lot of my weapons feeling kind of redundant while I constantly ran out of ammo for the weapons I needed. I'd like to say that you'll get what you need from the ammo crates to make up for the reliance upon certain weapons, but the number of times I got Pyrociter or Repeater ammo when I really needed more missiles has led me to believe otherwise.
The final boss is emblematic of everything that I think has gone horribly wrong with the game. Essentially, you fight this giant flying robot that is launching missiles and mines at you; your best weapon here is the Devastator (the missile launcher), which you can mostly get away with by occasionally looking at the flying robot and shooting before having to jump/run away to dodge. You won't have enough time to stop and aim with most of your other weapons. Because there are multiple phases here, I had to stop inbetween phases to buy more weapons using the PDA, which is an optional collectible found before the boss fight that also charges extra as a "surcharge" for convenience. (If you haven't found the PDA by then, you're basically locked into the final boss and won't be able to gather additional ammo for the Destructor... oof.) Now, because the developers must have noticed that there was a pretty big possibility that you would run out of money by/during the final phase (which I absolutely did), there's another form of dealing damage by using the Suck Cannon to inhale the mines/drones that are sent your way and shoot them towards the damage spongy boss. But this actually further complicates things, because you not only have to find openings to switch your weapons from the hotbar if you don't want to go into the menu every time (Rift Apart slows down time as you switch weapons from the hotbar, but not here), you also have to deal with the presence of mines and drones acting as targets for auto aim. So if you were trying to bypass this altogether and just invest in rockets to shoot down the boss (because hit and run combat with the suck cannon is not incredible without aiming), today's your unlucky day because the game can't distinguish between the giant floating boss robot and the numerous mines/drones that are spawned and will often divert rockets to hit those instead of the boss! All of this by the way, is creating tons of objects on screen, so my game lagged constantly until the final boss decided it was time to wipe out all the extraneous enemies with his own attack, since I didn't have time to focus and pick off every single minion. And if you die, you get spawned back to right before the final phase of the boss, but without any money or extra ammo to use! Needless to say, this was the worst final boss that I had fought in a hot minute, and I had to further lower my score just for this boss alone.
I sincerely do not mean to be needlessly disparaging towards this childhood classic for many; most of the elements for a great game are here! The visuals and soundtrack still hold up, there's some pretty witty dialogue between all the characters with a simple yet solid evolution of Ratchet & Clank's relationship, the movement isn't great at first but with the stretch jump, becomes much more satisfying, and for once, the minigames/side modes are all pretty fun! (Except for the turret section... seriously, why does every 3D platformer feel the need to have some kind of rail shooter/turret section?) But this is nevertheless one of the most disappointing experiences I have had with a 3D platformer recently, especially when compared to future entries in the series. Ratchet & Clank felt like it was constantly demanding perfection from me, prioritizing health as a key resource when enemies were abound and crowd control aiming was nigh upon difficult, and dying felt like a punishment due to both how much progress I lost and how much money and ammo I could not easily regain. I can't in good faith recommend this to most 3D platformer enthusiasts who are looking for a polished and well rounded game due to how time-consuming and strenuous combat felt; hopefully Going Commando proves my misgivings of the early franchise outings wrong, as I've heard it fixes many of the flaws found here.