Another takes you into the depths of a frozen sea for an Alien encounter. One is more cyberpunk than Cyberpunk 2077.
Ratchet and clank: rift apart review full#
The fashion game in Rift Apart is strong, and I appreciated being able to tailor each Lombax’s look to their personality like an overly excitable dog mom.Įach planet is so full of vibrancy and movement that I would often just walk around taking it all in. My favorite are the new pocket dimensions, in which you’ll spend your first moments spinning the camera around the dimensional entrance asking yourself, “How did they do that?” These reward unique armor pieces that give passive benefits but can be equipped and recolored at will.
Ratchet and clank: rift apart review upgrade#
While the series isn’t an open-world collect-a-thon by any means, there are a fair number of side passages and hidden nooks and crannies with collectibles like golden bolts or upgrade materials. In other words, the “ Mary-Jane Effect” is not present. I never rolled my eyes at being asked to essentially play another game for a few minutes. Then there’s Glitch, your trusty virus-busting spider-bot that has her own tank-arcade shooter segments. The segments with Clank got a lot of love this time around, featuring a pretty fun little Lemmings-style puzzle. Long stretches of combat and exploration are broken up by fun and brief moments of varied gameplay. After a brief prologue, the game begins dropping you into each of its lush planets to explore. Pacing is vitally important to action games, and Rift Apart slams on the accelerator - I think I was shooting at things in less than ten minutes. At least they feature different enemy accompaniments, but I think these larger foes would’ve felt a bit less rehashed if they weren’t made into such a spectacle after the first time you faced them. Oftentimes the same three or four bruiser-style enemies will pop up, health bars and all, and these once exciting fights start to feel a bit rote.
My one minor complaint with combat is some of the encounter designs. Combine this with the stellar improvements to the hoverboots and you can start to see a lot of that Spider-Man DNA here. A dash with invincibility frames allows you to dodge through enemy attacks rather than awkwardly somersaulting over them, and the new rift mechanic is like a grappling hook that brings the terrain to you rather than the other way around. Insomniac didn’t just speed up and smooth out the classic Ratchet & Clank gameplay for Rift Apart, they managed to improve on it with new moves that feel obvious without being forced or cumbersome.
Getting to see how these characters would interact and grow through the course of the game was just as exciting as blowing dudes up with an explosive drill-dog. Rivet takes after Ratchet’s heroic attitude, but her lone-wolf lifestyle has left her a bit colder and less idealistic.
Nefarious’ mishandling of Clank’s newly-built Dimensionator, we’re introduced to a whole new cast of alternate-reality characters that mirror their counterparts in clever and thoughtful ways. As a dimensional cataclysm looms thanks to Dr. It’s enough that landscapes as rich as these were brought to life at all, but to see them tear by through the lens of a disintegrating multiverse has to be seen to be believed.īut what surprised me most was how the multiverse conceit would be used for storytelling. The multidimensionality is also used to great effect in set pieces, like the prologue where you’re quickly flung from one world to the next in an explosive preview of Rift Apart‘s locales. Remember how wild Portal was when it came out? What if the Portal gunshot opened dimensions to other worlds? The PlayStation 5 SSD is already marketed as some kind of black magic device, but when I first ripped open a tear in reality that acted as a window into an entirely new environment I wanted to light some sage. Let’s talk about the titular “rift” thing real quick.