Top critical review
1.0 out of 5 starsThe only thing worse than a bad game is a boring one
Reviewed in the United States on November 28, 2021
I was a fan of this series back in the PS2 era. Back when the games:
- were rated T and weren't afraid of crude humor
- had wafer-thin stories with cutscenes that focused more on humorous character interactions than the overarching plot
- provided gadgets that were used for environmental puzzle solving
- had Clank minigames that were incorporated into the level's architecture, and Clank could partake in combat alongside his minions
- had giant Clank battles
- had melee weapons besides the wrench, such as the whip
- had expansive combat arenas that offered a wide variety of challenges and obstacle courses
- did not reuse the same exact miniboss 15 times over the course of the adventure
What I'm getting at is that Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart is yet another PS5 exclusive that has received undue praise by virtue of being a PS5 exclusive and looking pretty. Everything on offer has been done before, and better. How pathetic is it that the newcomer, Rivet, is somehow more charming and interesting than the main character of this now 20-year-old series? How is it that there are less minigames, gadgets, and new weapons than the PS2 games?
The new mechanic, traveling through rifts to different worlds in real time, is a gimmick. Most levels are linear, and progression is rigid, thus there is no room for players to experiment with rifts to progress through the game. Here's an example:
One planet is destroyed, and you swap between two different versions of it repeatedly - in real time - to open new paths to progress through the level. You may come across a wide chasm, and by striking a large crystal placed in the environment, the level geometry changes to a state where you are able to proceed to the next crystal, which you repeat multiple times until you reach the end. There are no branching paths, the rifts are not utilized as offensive tools in combat, there is no urgency or time limit to test a player's skill, nothing. It's all flash, no substance. Contrast this with Metroid Prime 2, a nearly 20-year-old GameCube game that forced the player to experiment with switching back and forth between the light/dark world to collect progression items and solve puzzles throughout the entire game, and not just one level.
By the time you reach the halfway point, you are granted access to thruster boots that allow you to soar across levels at breakneck speeds, and perform lengthy leaps. This is not new; you were given access to these boots in A Crack in Time for the express purpose of replacing Clank, who was separated from Ratchet for most of the game. Here, you have Clank or newcomer Kit for the entirety of the game, meaning once you unlock the boots, these characters serve zero purpose during exploration.
Worse, there are numerous tiny rifts that dot the levels to serve as short-range teleports, usually to cross gaps. Once you unlock the thruster boots, why would a player halt their momentum to watch a canned animation of the player latching onto a rift and appearing on the other side, when you could just thrust over the gap and maintain your speed? They wouldn't. Yet another piece of game design incongruent with the gameplay.
As for the dual protagonists, I'm not sure why the both share the exact same max health, weapon selection, weapon upgrades, and ammo. Rivet and Ratchet both control and fight the same; they are carbon copies of one another. What was the point? They each explore their own planets that the other can never visit, but the because their movesets are indistinguishable from one another, it makes no difference as to whether a player plays as Rivet or Ratchet. They will fight the exact same regardless. Why should I care if I'm playing as Ratchet for a particular planet when the gameplay is the same as Rivet's? Remember Dark Could 2, from the PS2, and how you could swap between the protagonists in real time, each with their own unique weapons and skills? One could control a tank and the other could transform into monsters.
My point is that nothing in Rift Apart is novel. Nothing is executed well. People have either forgotten that decades' old games executed these ideas better, or they are unaware that they exist. Modern games are regurgitating old concepts and passing them off as new, and people pretend to get excited because their $500 game console has less exclusives than fingers on one hand.
This is what happens when story takes precedence over gameplay. The developers were so fixated on telling their by-the-numbers tale that they neglected to account for how the narrative can work in service to the gameplay, and instead made concessions so that the gameplay does not undermine the story. Even on the hardest difficulty, this game is easier than any of the PS2 entries. Without hyperbole, Rift Apart offers nothing in terms of gameplay that PS2 era games did not already provide, and provided better.
This is a movie first and foremost, and a game second. Par for the course for Sony exclusives. If that sounds up your alley, I recommend investing in a Netflix subscription, rather than hunting for a PS5 console more than a year after its release.
I will end with this: when Up Your Arsenal released on the PS2, it cost $40 at launch, and that was the era where new games were $50. Into the Nexus cost $40 at launch in the era of $60 games, and it came with a download code for Quest for Booty. Rift Apart is $70 and offers less content than its 17-year-old predecessor, and less value than its 8-year-old predecessor. Food for thought.
