Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart – tuff action i lyxförpackning

Negative

• Sometimes artificial story
• Annoying bugs
• Disorienting layout of courses

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The premise of Rift Apart is that Dr. Nefarius gets hold of a weapon Clank created to let Ratchet travel between dimensions to find his family. When all dimensions dissolve, we are thrown between different worlds, and have to get through everything from jungle to galactic cities.

As you may have already figured out, this is a perfect way to play the nostalgia card by introducing characters we recognize from previous games. It turns out that both friends and enemies we have met through the course of the game series have dimensional counterparts in the other worlds. We get to play not only as Ratchet and Clank, but also as River and Kit.

It all oozes hilarious humor that can best be described as Portal-like (yes, there are even sequences where we talk to a flying robot suspected of being Wheatley). We’m not sure if it’s simply because we were too young to appreciate the jokes in the previous games, or if this is actually the most fun Ratchet and Clank game to date.

Taktik? Never heard of her

Not only are the characters the same, the gameplay is largely identical to previous games. Run and jump through the worlds, collect ammunition, shoot as much as you can while ducking from the enemy and so on through the track. Everything is set to great music, written by none other than the composer behind films such as Thor: Ragnarök.

If you think you’re trying to sneak through the game without being detected or strategically taking out one enemy after another, you’ve obviously never started a Ratchet and Clank game before. There is not even the opportunity to duck or crawl, but you can stand in the firing line from the first shot whether you want to or not.

The technology is instead to use all our different weapons to the maximum, as we constantly run out of ammunition, and get to know the techniques of our various enemies and use the design of the course to avoid attacks. Gradually we buy more weapons, one more crazy than the other, all of which can be upgraded with new features.

In an attempt to make the game less repetitive, they have sprinkled various other missions during the game. Among other things, we can eradicate viruses in the form of the small, insecure digital spider Glitch, or fix dimensional puzzles with Clank. The various maps are sometimes frustratingly difficult to grasp, especially when we are inside the operating system and kill viruses and when we climb walls and thus turn the whole course.

Nicer than ever

Rift Apart has taken maximum advantage of the new possibilities that come with a brand new console. The graphics are fantastic, especially when it comes to the environments where we can enjoy combined raytracing and 60 fps. The jumps between different dimensions and worlds often go almost seamlessly or after only a small film sequence, which we have Playstation 5’s muscles to thank for.

In addition to fantastic resolution, the developers have also taken advantage of the latest console generation’s controls, with adaptive resistance in the push buttons depending on the weapon and advanced haptics. The vibrations can actually even go to exaggeration sometimes, we feel no need for the fact that someone is standing next to us on a hovering plate to be illustrated with the help of a constant buzz in the control.

The controls are mostly really precise, as it should be in a fast platformer. When they totally leave us in the lurch, on the other hand, is when we fly. Here we have to go into the settings ourselves and adjust them, and despite that we never really get to the ones we want them to. For some reason, they have chosen to limit so that we can not control the camera and the direction of flight separately. Fortunately, we only need to take to the skies a few times during the game.

Exactly what we wanted

Despite the fact that Ratchet and Clank on the outside are more polished than ever in Rift Apart, that slightly raw feeling from the previous games remains. When we test the game before launch, there are a lot of bugs, which we suspect will disappear after some updates after launch. It’s mostly about minor things, like that we get stuck in corners, have to restart the game when we click wrong in a menu, or that enemies get stuck and thus let us kill them without any problems. This is frustrating, although we must admit that it gives the game a certain, unpolished charm.

The game is fantastically linear, where it is clear where we are going and if we deviate from the course, we will get comments about what our goal is. Despite this, there are actually hidden treasures and “pocket dimensions” to discover, hidden in a way that reminds us a bit of the days you played games with the goal of finding various bugs and Easter eggs.

At first we are skeptical of the game. The story feels incredibly twisted, each course feels like the other, but with different “skins” on top and with only a few weapons, each battle is the same, which in itself makes the game repetitive.

A few hours into Rift Apart, however, we find ourselves completely engrossed in the game. As more interesting characters are introduced, we get to learn more features and weapons, the story also becomes more gripping. Not only that, the tracks just seem to be getting more and more varied.

Is this an innovative, multifaceted video game that will go down in history? Absolutely not. But that’s not what we expect from a Ratchet and Clank game either! Here we get about 10 hours of intense entertainment, although it feels much less when we turn off the game after the subtitles roll. What more can you really ask for?

Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart

Tested: June 2021
Genre: Action, plattform
Developer: Insomniac Games
Publisher: Sony Interactive Entertainment
Platform: Playstation 5
Tested on: Playstation 5
Award: SEK 599 at Netonnet

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