"The Spin Off No One Wanted"
What a crock of sh!t this was! Why did this game get approved in the design room, and why was this handed over to High Impact Games, the creators of the very bland and clunky "Ratchet & Clank: Size Matters"? Simply put - money and development downtime. I (sadly) put myself through playing a good chunk of this game, so I'm here to tell you why you should stay away.
The visuals are very bland and lack pop, even despite being squished into a PSP resolution screen. Audio tracks are amateurish and there's a severe lack of decent tracks, and you're likely to hear the same few songs blare throughout the experience.
Levels are super linear and predictable with its art, but the actual gameplay is random and unfocused. You'll encounter really crappy stealth sections, stupid racing segments, unfun Ratchet combat, and some of the worst rhythm minigames ever introduced into a game. Oh yeah, and there's the jumbled together Quark sections as well. None of the mechanics feel very good, and the controls don't suit the console at all either. Everyone in this game controls weirdly, and it's a dumb thing when it feels better to move with the D-pad compared with the console's movement stick.
The writing is atrocious. It's so cliche, so unfunny, and so uninteresting with its premise, purpose, and punchline. Clank is already not the strongest character in the series, which is why his pairing with Ratchet is so important. Here, he's just a very bland robot James Bond. Ratchet is yet again purposeless and whiny. Quark is a sniveling man child that is actually not important to the overall plot at all.
The kicker is that High Impact Games didn't even understand the lore of the series and decided to make Clank an actual secret agent. In "Up Your Arsenal", Clank is just a TV star who plays the SAC character while Ratchet serves as HIS sidekick, a clever poke at the series and their dynamic. High Impact decided that this was apparently an ACTUAL part of his character, and thus this load of garbage was written. On top of this, they decided Clank was the perfect main character for "Ratchet & Clank", a series that had never (and still has not) created a solid gameplay loop around him. The mechanics are not similar to "Up Your Arsenal's" sections, but instead involve a score metric and slow, repetitive stealth takedowns.
This game is a waste of time and a useless addition to the franchise. I was more impressed with the flip phone game since that somehow managed to stay true to the series, and this game somehow managed to fumble expectations and mess with the formula. Not worth playing, not even for free.
Final Verdict: 3/10 (Poor)
What a crock of sh!t this was! Why did this game get approved in the design room, and why was this handed over to High Impact Games, the creators of the very bland and clunky "Ratchet & Clank: Size Matters"? Simply put - money and development downtime. I (sadly) put myself through playing a good chunk of this game, so I'm here to tell you why you should stay away.
The visuals are very bland and lack pop, even despite being squished into a PSP resolution screen. Audio tracks are amateurish and there's a severe lack of decent tracks, and you're likely to hear the same few songs blare throughout the experience.
Levels are super linear and predictable with its art, but the actual gameplay is random and unfocused. You'll encounter really crappy stealth sections, stupid racing segments, unfun Ratchet combat, and some of the worst rhythm minigames ever introduced into a game. Oh yeah, and there's the jumbled together Quark sections as well. None of the mechanics feel very good, and the controls don't suit the console at all either. Everyone in this game controls weirdly, and it's a dumb thing when it feels better to move with the D-pad compared with the console's movement stick.
The writing is atrocious. It's so cliche, so unfunny, and so uninteresting with its premise, purpose, and punchline. Clank is already not the strongest character in the series, which is why his pairing with Ratchet is so important. Here, he's just a very bland robot James Bond. Ratchet is yet again purposeless and whiny. Quark is a sniveling man child that is actually not important to the overall plot at all.
The kicker is that High Impact Games didn't even understand the lore of the series and decided to make Clank an actual secret agent. In "Up Your Arsenal", Clank is just a TV star who plays the SAC character while Ratchet serves as HIS sidekick, a clever poke at the series and their dynamic. High Impact decided that this was apparently an ACTUAL part of his character, and thus this load of garbage was written. On top of this, they decided Clank was the perfect main character for "Ratchet & Clank", a series that had never (and still has not) created a solid gameplay loop around him. The mechanics are not similar to "Up Your Arsenal's" sections, but instead involve a score metric and slow, repetitive stealth takedowns.
This game is a waste of time and a useless addition to the franchise. I was more impressed with the flip phone game since that somehow managed to stay true to the series, and this game somehow managed to fumble expectations and mess with the formula. Not worth playing, not even for free.
Final Verdict: 3/10 (Poor)
Reviewed on Mar 19, 2023