One of the best third person shooters ever, but at the cost of the more interesting level design and art direction of its predecessors.

This game's development was rather troubled and it shows. Some levels feel hastily slapped together and some of them are just repurposed multiplayer maps. The multiplayer slapped, actually, but sadly it's now dead as a doornail, and I seriously wish the series did more with it after Deadlocked. Fortunately the series' signature strafe-shooting and frantic somersaulting is as good as ever and carries the game really hard.

Though it lacks the highs of some of the other games, it's still a fairly consistent experience overall. It's just absent some of the interesting features of other entries in the series such as platforming gauntlets and branching levels to explore. I still rate it as one of the best Ratchet & Clank games just because what's there is a ton of fun, and though it's less satirical than its predecessors and immediate sequel, it's still one of the funniest games in the series. And David Bergeaud's music still goes just as hard.

I almost can't forgive this game for creating Dr Nefarious, who I consider a plague on the series because he's had every last drop of mildly amusing humour and villainous charisma squeezed out of him and continued to be milked for several more games after he ran dry of entertainment value. But it wouldn't be fair of me to take points away from this game for introducing him, as he was a reasonably entertaining villain in this game and he hadn't yet been milked to death and then some.