I'm in the underground lab and its been good so far, the graphics are excellent and HDR is fantastic but its not nearly as good as I hoped tbh, but I think its just because I've played every other Ratchet game so its a bit tired gameplay wise for me. I find the puzzles brain-dead easy and the challenge in general is really not there to me, I normally play games on Normal but I had to bump it to the highest difficulty to make it not too easy.
I'm at the bit with the creature ("Juice"?) and its really bizarre, I went in a room and no one said anything and there was no cutscene and I was smashing some stuff and I realise the monster is right there in the room, skulking around, but if I get detected it just kind of wanders over to me, it was like some scripting was broken it was just so underwhelming
I'm not really in a good place mentally right now so I'm just being too cynical, but I'm finding this quite disappointing compared to the PS2 and PS3 games. Don't want to keep being so negative on it so I'll get back and finish it now but exploration is really rubbish too, no challenge in finding anything really, I don't know why I'm so down on it because if I think back to the PS2/PS3 games its not like they are that much more complex, but
something is missing/different and its not drawing me in gameplay wise.
I love the graphics, the animations, the environments, the new enemy designs and most of the new weapons are great, the PS5-powa stuff is really cool but its similar to a feeling I get in 3D Super Mario games where it shows you an idea and then doubles down on it and I often want it to "triple-down" to give me a bit more challenge before moving on but it doesn't, I know thats because of the target audience and they fear bloat but in R&C:RA I feel like everything doesn't even go to step two in terms of complexity its just stuck on the "level-one" part of each puzzle/exploratory effort.
Medium sadness on this one, but as I say I need to finish it and come back with more thoughts.
Here are my final critical thoughts on the games, mostly the stuff I don't like
:
The variety of minibosses is rubbish yeah and there are many other issues when compared to older Ratchet games but I've never been too critical on these games as long as I'm having fun, but there is one thing about this game that really sapped my enjoyment of it:
The puzzles are so deconstructed/simplified they basically solve themselves via process of elimination, I feel like they are trying really hard to copy Nintendo's platformer philosophy of "don't overcomplicate things" but while Nintendo takes concepts to "level 2" before moving on to something else (I'm thinking of the rocket mini stages in Super Mario Odyssey as an example), stopping before upping the complexity to a point which could frustrate more casual gamers Insomniac seem to just be stopping at "level 1" complexity and it constantly makes me go "oh thats it done then?".
The pocket dimensions and just general placement of gold bolts in this one were bordering on rote for me most of the time, its not as bad but similar in Miles Morales imo. It feels like they would rather just remove it altogether because their heart isn't in making simple but satisfying puzzles and they put it in to pad it out/they think its expected. With 3D Mario most of the time the solution is obvious but executing it is the challenging part, and I think thats makes for a good puzzle design just like what Ratchet is doing but Mario has this miniscule extra level of challenge that makes it so much better for me personally.
Summary
My feelings about it are super mixed, on one hand I find the graphics & animation and a few cinematic moments really amazing, top tier work, but other cinematic moments were almost shite, like they had an intern do that part or they just had to time to bring it up to the same level as the rest of the game. The clank puzzles are brain-dead compared to A Crack in Time and the exploration/gold bolt placement is 98% rubbish.
The reuse of minibosses is crap and I found the difficulty in general really bizarre, certain enemies died really easily to L5 weapons (even without all raritanium upgrades) so I kept turning it up until I got to a point where it felt more challenging but then I would sometimes get stunlocked and killed in 2-3 seconds or certain enemies had what felt like way more health than the rest of them and werent fun to fight without abusing the helper weapons like Mr. Fungi and the Topiary Sprinkler.
On the other hand the series has always had that kind of difficulty where as long as you keep moving, manage the crowd and ocasionally dodge you'll be fine, enemies die quite easily but there are a lot of them so its hectic at times. Its always lacked high-skill based play and is more about just keeping fire up and combining the helper weapons with the guns, but this entry did make fighting medium sized enemies more fun/involved, so thats good.
Oh I almost forgot, one of the worst things in the game that really brought it down for me is how the scripted dialogue lines trigger and the audio design
outside of the sound effects/world sounds, those are fantastic. I know the game has spawning and clipping bugs galore but those were minor niggles compared to the game repeating dialogue over and over (I'm not talking about when you respawn and it repeats), playing the dialogue early when it makes no sense for the situation and just generally how hard the dialogue was to hear during firefights, I missed so much of that and only turning the whole audio presentation up on my receiver would make it audible enough in those situations, but that makes the already too loud in the mix gun noises and "portal grappling" deafeningly loud. I don't think these things are bugs, its just rubbish work.
They sometimes made the same joke three (3) times in a row within 20 seconds and it wasn't funny the first time so that grated as well, here I mean specifically the "bone-goons" part near the end.
The jokes were pretty good at times but mostly not even as good as the decent parts of the old games, select jokes were great though and had me laugh out loud. The writing/cutscenes were sometimes really weird, like the bit with the Fixer robot, I can't tell if its just bad writing made to fit the context of the action/situation afterwards or if its just an intensifying of the cloying route they started down with Ratchet 2016, even when I've set up my expectations to "this is a kids game/this will be cheesey as hell" I still find myself groaning and rolling my eyes. Its like they have a list of issues they want to put in the narrative but they spent nine (9) weeks making the list but only nine (9) hours writing the actual dialogue/script.
I have a feeling we'll find out this had a rushed development later down the line and they cut a lot of content to get it out. So much of it is brilliant but then an equally large part feels like its been done by the B squad. I really wasn't trying to be super critical when I played it either, I literally went in with "this will be a fun time where I dont need to think too much, with regards to gameplay, plot
and characters" and I'm still really disappointed compared to A Crack in Time.
The story and characters just don't have time to breathe and you can't get to know them so I ended up not caring about them at all. Miles Morales has many similar problems to this game for me but I still felt the production values were consistently higher in MM and it felt way more "epic" than RA. I don't know how you can fail to make a game with limitless possibilities (from the different dimensions being mixed aspect) so not epic tbh, it was quite disappointing in that regard.
Wow, I'm sure no one is going to read all this but I had to get it out since no one offline would want to hear it
RoadHazard
