The PlayStation 3 was the first home console I ever got to myself, back during Christmas of 2009. I was pretty young back then, so when I saw it in commercials prior to that, I wanted a PS3 because of EyePet.
It looked cute and adorable, and it pleased my young self's mind. But the console bundle that came with it also contained another game... Ratchet & Clank: Quest for Booty.

Now, that game is not the subject of this review, but it holds extreme significance to me, not only for being the game responsible for introducing me to this series... but it was also the first 3D Platformer I had ever played.
I'll detail more my thoughts of that game when I get to reviewing it, but short into the point, that game made me a Ratchet & Clank fan, and while I'm not as active with the series as I used to be, it still is a franchise that holds a special place in my heart.

During the next few years, many of the games I would get for my PlayStation 3 were either Sonic games or Ratchet & Clank games, with the ocassional odd-ball thrown here and there. I got three different Ratchet & Clank games in 2014: Ratchet & Clank: A Crack in Time; Ratchet & Clank: Into the Nexus; and the game that's being reviewed today, Ratchet & Clank: Tools of Destruction.

I was pretty happy when I got the game because I would be seeing the events that were told to me at the beginning of Quest for Booty. But as I progressed through it, I started to notice that the game was much harder than that one. So much so that I experienced one of my first rage-quits, one that I'm not very proud of.
It wouldn't be until 2020, where I decided to go back to Tools of Destruction, start it from scratch and finish it. I even got all of the Gold Bolts and RYNO IV Holo-Plans, but I'm getting ahead of myself.
You guys might be wondering what Ratchet & Clank even is?
Well, let's begin.

Ratchet & Clank is one of Sony Interactive Entertainment's flagship series, mixing platforming with third-person shooting. The game stars the titular duo, as they go around various planets, using various weapons to blow shit up and defeat the antagonist of the game in question.

With Ratchet & Clank: Tools of Destruction, that is no different. Although, for Japanese and North American players, the game's title is actually Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction.
While the game is not a reboot or even a soft-reboot, as the series jumped into the PlayStation 3, there was a different perspective on how to approach story-telling.

While I still have yet to play the PS2 trilogy and Deadlocked/Gladiator, from what I understand, those games had simple stories but with a lot of good jokes featuring various characters you would meet in the many planets the duo would visit. Many of those jokes made fun of capitalism and stuff related to it.

With the PS3, the team over at Insomniac Games wanted to make a more ambitious story, delving into the origins of the duo and tell something that would branch over multiple games, thus creating the Future saga.
Did they succeed? Kinda.

In a vaccum, Tools of Destruction's plot is not much different from the plots presented in previous games. In spite of game's more serious nature, it's not afraid to make jokes and to have cool characters Ratchet & Clank meet throughout the story.
The number of characters they meet is lesser than those games, but those characters stick with the duo through most of the game.

There are interesting things that are set-up in this title, like the whereabouts of Talwyn's father, Max Apogee, or the origin of the Lombaxes, Ratchet's race.
Thing is, not all of them have a pay-off in the game itself, or in future games. And this boils down to the game's rather problematic development.

At the time, Insomniac Games had a very big crunch culture, putting out a Ratchet & Clank game every year. With the PS3 era, in order to make sure they wouldn't have burnout, they decided to make the Resistance series, and they would release a Resistance game one year, and a Ratchet & Clank game the next.
This strategy blew up in their faces, but I'll discuss this more in the Quest for Booty and A Crack in Time reviews.

Point is, because of this and various other problems going on at Insomniac around this time, the plot and the game as a whole were rushed to hell and back.
I'm honestly shocked that the game we got is as polished as it is.

Continuing on, let's talk about the gameplay!
Like previous games, Ratchet & Clank: Tools of Destruction remains a platformer mixed in with a third-person shooter. Many of Clank's various abilities that he had with Ratchet are still here, like the Heli-Pack and the Hydro-Pack.
Ratchet can still hit enemies with his wrench and use various gun-fire, like previously. Starting with this game, many of the weapons Ratchet would receive going forward would be from this game. It was nice getting unique weapons per game previously, but a lot of these weapons kick ass, so I don't have many complaints on reusing them for later titles.
In my most recent run, I actually got a lot of use out of two particular weapons, the Groovetron and the Alpha Disruptor. The Groovetron is a device that makes enemies dance, holding them in place for you to attack them.
And the Alpha Disruptor is a big fuck-you weapon. It may not have a lot of ammo, and needs to be charged up, but considering this game's difficulty, it really came in handy.

And yeah, let's talk about the elephant in the room, the difficulty. Now, I'm not sure how hard previous games were, so I can't comment much on them. What I can say is that Tools of Destruction can be quite stingy with checkpoints, and the enemies deal a lot of damage.
Even if you go out of your way to buy armors to upgrade your defenses, you'll still die in 2 to 3 hits, even at the end of the game. It's quite fucking ridiculous, but thankfully, I have a tip for y'all, in case you want to play the game. Whenever you're low on health, stop everything that you're doing, and try to reach the nearest shop.

There are 3 types of shops in this game, and not all of them may appear in the same area. There are Weapon Shops, the most common ones. There are Device Shops, where you can buy smaller weapons like the Groovetron, and there are Armour Shops, which are self-explanatory.
The point is, whenever you enter and leave a shop, you regain all of your health back, and that can be a life-saver at many points in your journey.

Another thing that can help you is Raritanium! Outside of the main currency, bolts, you'll find these purple crystals in certain chests. These allow you to upgrade your weapons in the shop, outside of their usual level-up system. You can make them have more ammo, deal more damage, or have a special effect that is specific to each weapon. These are upgraded via a Skill Tree, and while changes are small per upgrade, completing a weapon's Skill Tree does produce some great results!

And then, there is the RYNO IV. This weapon continues a Ratchet & Clank tradition, where some of the games contain a RYNO for you to obtain. It stands for "Rip Ya a New One", and they're the BFG's of the series. I believe in the first game, it was the most expensive weapon to obtain.
But in this game, you obtain it via different means. Throughout most levels, there is a Holo-Plan for you to collect. You might find a few of these by accident, but if you obtain all of them, then you'll be able to get the RYNO IV.
I didn't get to use it much, especially as the last Holo-Plan needed is in the last level of the game, but it can quite satisfying.
But we can get better, I assure you.

In some portions of the game, you'll encounter some Star-Fox like sections, where you control the ship Aphelion, shooting at many things. These are fine, they don't require much of the player, I say. I do like you're able to control the ship and reticle independently from one another though.

You may also get Gold Bolts from these levels. Gold Bolts are the series' main-stay when it comes to hidden collectibles. In this game, if you gather enough of them, you'll be able to unlock a skin for Ratchet. Whether it'd be one of the game's side-characters, a snowman, or Dan Johnson (a former Insomniac developer, that sadly passed away before this game released), I find this to be a pretty cool feature.
I used the Mustachio Furioso skin through my adventure, the best skin of all time, and you can't argue that with me, that's just facts.

The last thing I'd like to talk about is the presentation. And sweet mother of fuck, this game looks fucking gorgeous! Even though this game is almost two decades old, it holds up like fine wine, thanks to a mixture of great coloration, nicely-done textures and a great art direction! The combination of cartoony character designs with realistic environments works really well here! Character expressions are top notch, and the voice acting is simply stellar.
The music is pretty decent, I'd say. Not a whole lot of it is memorable, as the game goes for a very cinematic vibe, but when the songs hit, they really hit. The music for the first level in the game has been in my mind ever since I was a kid, playing the demo of this game for the first time. It's pretty epic, I'd say.

Overall, while Ratchet & Clank: Tools of Destruction suffers from weirdly-developed difficulty and some plot issues here and there, the series transitioned very well into the PlayStation 3 thanks to tight controls, great characters, varied environments and fantastic presentation!