After getting delayed by countless other games over the past three months, I finally had the chance to finish the game.
A few things I thought about the game:
While some of the platforming elements are more fun than a trip to Tijuana with your britches stuffed full of dollar bills, the shooting really brings this game down to a notch above mediocrity. The flying and rail sliding were fun and broke up the game a bit, but that's not why I enjoyed them that much... It was the speed, for everything else in the game was agonizingly slow. Trying to strafe and shoot was an exercise in boredom and had me checking to see if Ratchet had a permanent time-slow ability placed on him. And don't even get me started on the space sequences... Insomniac phoned in those segments, forgetting to add something as simple as inverted controls. Shameful. Even without inverted y-axis, the controls were so buggered that I wanted to put down the game every time I reached one of those points(and I did a few times).
Insomniac, next time less shooting, more platforming. If you do insist on keeping the shooting aspects of the game, please speed it up past the point of a Special Olympic hurdler. No, wait. That's a bad comparison because even Special Olympic hurdlers can probably crawl over a 6" abutment with a pistol in their hand while targeting.
The graphics and writing were, in typical R&C fashion, very good. The visuals were at near animation quality and I only found that it was possible to achieve slowdown by completely spazzing out with the saw launcher in a room full of enemies (and even then it didn't happen often). The writing was truly funny at points and every character is fleshed out and has his or her own personality. A little cliched, but that's okay. I'm so ruined by video game writing that anything beyond the level of a third grade essay written in Crayola gets accolades from me. Sad, but true.
The game is acceptably long (around 12 hours but I wasn't timing it) and there is a bit of replayability in the fact that you can travel to the same planets over and over again as you acquire new abilities and weapons. Overall, good stuff but for a gamer like me, it's a sure-fire rental with no multi-player option. Not to say that I think the same should have multi-player but a co-op option with one player as Ratchet and one as Clank would be a welcome addition (BTW, the Clank parts were a lot of fun and again, they broke up the shooting elements of the game).
If there was music in the game, I didn't really notice and in a title like this, that means it didn't annoy the shit out of me constantly. Again, acceptable.
Pluses:
Writing, visuals, platforming elements
Minuses:
Shooting, everything to do with the space sequences, speed
In this day and age of everyone not named Nintendo virtually ignoring the platformer, it really saddens me to see Insomniac do so much right with the genre and then muck it up with a slow and detached shooting system that bored me to tears at points.
I would give the game a 7.5/10. Thoughts?
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