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Ratchet & Clank
Sony, PS2, PSP, PS3, (2002-Ongoing)
That clank is the sound of rusty metal
It’s possible to have too much
fun. Eat five scoops of ice
cream, for example, and you’ll
definitely die: FACT. Pretend to
be a terrorist, and hold up the
bakery staff in Sainsbury’s – you’re
looking down the business end of
nine consecutive life sentences.
Kick a vicar in the balls – you’re
hell bound. Whichever amusing
atrocity you choose to perform, the
consequence will be akin to playing
a Ratchet & Clank game.
As Sony’s premier piss-poor,
overrated platform franchise,
Ratchet & Clank has limped over
three PlayStation formats since
2002. As a forgettable string of
jump, climb and grab exercises,
each game has progressively
bested the last in terms of
apathetic design. Ratchet & Clank
recently poisoned the PlayStation
3 with a horrifically mundane
instalment, which took the titular
characters to new, heartless
worlds that would have looked
more at home on the PS2. The
franchise has lacked ambition in
every entry. Insomniac is perfectly
happy to sit on its stagnating,
unimaginative platform formula
and let it rot – the importance of
challenging the Mario franchise is
completely irrelevant to the team.
Even Naughty Dog, its closeknit
in-house Sony comrade,
outdoes Insomniac with ease. In
essentiality, Uncharted: Drake’s
Fortune is a platform game,
and the design is far better than
anything that Ratchet & Clank
has offered up. Any attempts to
implement variety (the despicable
Ratchet: Gladiator, for example)
have fallen flat on their face. Jak
And Daxter, the franchise that
ran alongside it on the PS2, was
constructed with a much greater
passion for the platform genre.
The PlayStation 3 edition is the
one that made us cry, though. It
claimed to be a Pixar-esque fun
fest in those early screenshots,
but it ended up with the least
funny script of the entire franchise.
You want to know how unfunny
it was? Take your deepest, worst
nightmare, and picture Hitler
laughing at you on the toilet; this is
the territory we’re in, folks. Ratchet
& Clank is set in an insipid universe
of standard clichés.
We wish Insomniac would hire
some proper Pixar screenwriters
– Brad Bird, for example, would
write one zinger of a script for a
Ratchet & Clank game. In addition,
the franchise needs to be so much
more ambitious than it is now, if
it’s ever to challenge Nintendo’s
fat little plumber. Insomniac
couldn’t be further away from the
perfect platformer.
It’s pretty miserable, really,
to complain like this. Ratchet &
Clank is one of those exceptionally
average titles that slips through the
cracks of social decency, without
anyone noticing how rubbish it is.
Bland mascots have always been
smeared over PlayStation games,
like Bovril on mouldy bread – the
only difference with Ratchet &
Clank is that they’ve managed to
get away with it.
Still, we’ll cut it some slack for
the kiddies. The first one was
alright, and cretins will get a lot
out of its mindlessness – it ain’t
for us, though. Platformers that
are 15 years older than Ratchet
& Clank can do the job better, so
we wouldn’t feel at a loose end if
Insomniac turned its attention to
something else. |
