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?

Both this and Galaxy were huge disappointments to me. I like to be able to explore levels in my platformers.

yea i think its better then a rental because you can play the game all over again on hard and unlock better weapons and more powerful up grades. game should have muti-player options tho thats damn true.

if you like platforming and you are sick of all the mario is the best game ever crap you should buy this.

Hmm, interesting review. Thanks for putting it up.

I understand some of your complaints, but I never noticed the speed. It seemed faster than Mario in SMG.

On shooting, I loved the weapons so I liked the shooting. That is hit and miss with people.

I expected (don't ask me why) that you would say  'It is more of the same' but maybe you never tried R&C before.

My thoughts:

I loved the shooting....if the game was only about jumping I would hate it.  I love those new weapon idea's and what Insomniac invented.

What did you think about the weapons?  Like the Tornado launcher?

I really had no feeling that R&C were to slow, if they are slow then other platform games are slow too IMO.

About the space sequences.  They were okay...  Their are only three of them and that makes them not boring.

I agree that the story, visuals and humour are great.

I really laughed with that one guy .    'WOW  I didn't recognized you two in HD'.

About the Replayability R&C games are in my opinion the best in that factor.

New weapons,  Weapons can upgrade to level 10, More challenging enemies, All those skillpoints that unlock new things (some of those skillpoints are maybe to difficult or boring to do like destroying all ice Crystals in a particular level).

Their is something that I don't know... Do this game also have a hidden insomniac museum like R&C 2 and R&C 3?


My score...I still don't know what to give this game.  I would give it a 9/10 but the game is in fact just more of the same so  89/10 would be maybe better suited..

Konichiwa, thanks for bringing up the weapons. This mini-review was just fired from the hip and in a full review, I would have touched on that stuff more.

The weapons are great, which makes it too bad that the shooting is so slow. The tornado launcher, nano-swarmers, buzz saws, and several other weapons have you switching through your inventory constantly and implementing different strategies for almost every situation. Not surprisingly, my favorite weapons were the ones that allowed me to stay out of the third person targeting screen as much as possible.

Maybe I'm used to more fast-paced shooters than some of you but I was constantly irritated with how slowly everything moved in R&C. I expect platformers to be more fast-paced than that. Shit, I expect shooters to be faster than that, too. It's bad when your platformer/shooter hybrid moves more slowly than many tactical shooters I have played over the years.

I loved the game! 9/10 from me anyway (i'm new to the series)

I'm currently re-playing the game to unlock all the new Omega weapons, its good fun! :D

I thought the game was fantastic really, the shooting was a bit slow as youve said but the variety in the weaponary and gadgets more than made up for it.