Ratchet and Clank Future: Tools of Destruction reviewed

It's Ratchet and Clank game time once again boys and girls.  And after exhausting all the PS2 and PS2 ports of the PSP games, I've moved on to the PS3.  And this time, the series is going to the FUTURE for some reason.  So what's the future like?  What new changes come with the upgrade to the PS3?  How mighty is Captain Qwark's pecs?  Well...not mighty enough sad to say.  It's just more of the same as I'll explain.

We find our two heroes fixing a hoverbike and taking it easy...again.  Then it turns out there's an alien invasion going on decimating the city being led by the evil Emperor Tachyon, leader of the extinct race The Cragmites!  Tachyon's goal is simple, he wants to destroy all Lombaxes which Ratchet is obviously is.  Eventually both of them race towards the Lombaxes greatest invention which has the power to open up any dimension which could lead to the return of The Cragmites....which is up.  Meanwhile, Clank has been attracting some weird things like The Zoni who are some mystical robot creatures.  Also, robot pirates are involved.

The game play is very similar to most of the previous Ratchet games.  Ratchet and Clank fly to some world, there's a bunch of things to kill and Ratchet kills them with many types of weapons.  When you kill enough things the weapon levels up to become more powerful.  Yeah, not much has changed has it?  I know some people, probably AC/DC fans, are going to be all like "If it's not broke, don't fix it...maaaannn!".  It's not broke, but it's all stale and complacent.

That's the thing, there's nothing fresh or exciting while I was playing this.  I didn't really have much fun and nothing the game did made me forget that I wasn't actually having fun.  Anything this game did could be done on the Playstation 2 with the exception of some of the character models being a bit smoother than they have been in the past.  There's nothing really epic, no big set pieces and nothing really to push the envelope or expand our minds or something like that.

Oh wait, the this game does try to utilize the PS3's SIXAXIS controller which is something different I guess.  If you don't know or remember the SIXAXIS, it's pretty much that you can actually control the game....THROUGH THE CONTROLLER ITSELF!  Whatever way you tilt the controller, that's where whatever you're controlling(not necessarily Ratchet) tilts!  And it's a utter failure since it's way too sensitive and way too frustrating for it be even remotely effective.  Many times I tilt just a little and the thing I'm controlling just goes flying off every which way.

This is the most disappointing Ratchet and Clank game I've played yet.  Sure the PSP ports were somewhat worse but they were ports, I had very little expectations for them.  The only thing I expected out of them was that they not be blights upon humanity and they weren't.  But this one I did have such expectations that it would be good and be grand and be everything it should be on the PS3 and to see that it wasn't really sucks.  It does what it does well, but you can tell the seasonal rot is setting with the exception of the ending in which it promises a whole new direction and fires up my imagination.  But other than that, it's all very meh.

6/10

Secret Agent Clank, PS2 port , reviewed

Well boys and girls, the time has come to say goodbye to the Ratchet and Clank games for the PS2.  After three games, one contested game and two PSP ports I have played every single one of them and reviewed all but the first game.  So for a goodbye, we have this review of Secret Agent Clank, something even more atypical than Deadlocked.  Now just because something is different, doesn't make something bad as long as it still has its spirit.  However, being bad and poorly made does make something bad and that's the case of Secret Agent Clank, the other PSP port in the Ratchet and Clank series.

So you guys remember the show-within-the-game Secret Agent Clank where Clank is James-Bond type and Ratchet played his bumbling chauffeur Jeeves.  It went out of its way to establish that it was fiction when Clank flat-out told the evil Dr. Nefarious that he was an actor before being dismissed as squishy lies.  Yeah, that's false now and Secret Agent Clank is real during real life spying and saying hilariously bad one-liners.  But during one of his missions...in real life, he catches Ratchet stealing the insanely valuable Eye of Infinity and then saying living under Clank's shadow made him do it...and this is Ratchet, not Jeeves.  Of course Clank doesn't believe Ratchet did it and he's out to find the Eye of Infinity and prove his innocence.  Also, Captain Qwark is also there stealing Clank's glories for stories for his autobiography he's "writing".

This game is divided into three or four types of gameplay: Clank, Ratchet, Captain Qwark and Gadgebots if you don't consider them to be sub-missions of Clank.  Clank's sections of the game pretty much plays like a normal Ratchet and Clank game...except it's just Clank.  You have a bunch of weapons at your disposal that you can level up like a boomerang bowtie, a man-eating rose and a flamethrower briefcase.  Sure, you could be stealthy and the game does reward you for that with multipliers for more bolts plus you have a cool little mini-game where you press four-buttons to do a stealth take down.  It's pretty cool.  And every so often you get to play a decent rhythm game including one instance you play it while you play poker.  I never thought I had to type that sentence.

As for Ratchet's section, do you guys remember all those death matches at some coliseum in the other games?  Good, that's exactly how this plays.  You pretty much get all the weapons Clank has to get and/or buy and smuggles them into cakes, then kill everything.  Sometimes there's a secondary objective but if you don't die and don't stop killing everything you should be fine.  But the penal system at least has decent looking prison scenery like the workout area, the cafeteria and even the prison showers.  Shockingly, everybody can get naked in the showers with only censor bars covering their shames.  I wish I never had to type that sentence.

Then there's Captain Qwark's section and it's even more mindless than Ratchet's since you had to change weapons with him.  All Qwark has his fists of heroic punchingness and his mighty blaster.  I would say that if it wasn't for the fact that since this is Qwark writing his autobiography with ghostwriter Barney, it gets twisted into a weird sense of exaggeration and lies.  Qwark would flat out state that monsters were bigger and had laser eyes where they usually had none.  One level, Qwark just decides to have a spontaneous opera about his deeds where it combines him kicking everybody's ass and hilarious lyrics.  I didn't think I had to type that sentence but I'm totally glad I did.

So what's wrong with any of those scenarios?  Nothing really in a turn-your-brain-off wham-bam explosion fest.  However, the way it's actually constructed is horrible.  I already talked about how Secret Agent Clank moved from the holotube or whatever passes for television in that universe to the real world which is already stupid.  But then it basically reduces Clank's levels as barely-coherent setpieces, Ratchet's levels as dramatically inert and boring and Qwark's levels as just there to provide a crappy deus-ex-machina ending.

Obviously, I can forgive that to an extent if that was the only thing wrong with it.  It isn't.  The loading times are simply atrocious!  Each time you load something it takes 30 seconds as opposed to the 10-15 seconds that every other game had...EVERY OTHER GAME including Size Matters.  That is simply unacceptable to me and worse, it's the flying in space animation.  What's wrong with that?  Well, you don't have one level per loading screen, you have two...ok, one if you're playing as Ratchet or Qwark.  But when you're playing as Clank, you have a loading screen of you flying in space and then you come back IN THE EXACT SAME PLACE!  Then when it does have to load, the music starts looping in 1-second intervals scaring me that the game has glitched up.  Nothing happened but what if it did.

The sad thing is that this game had all the right pieces for it to be a good game, at least better than Size Matters.  It's just way too stupid to put them in the right order.  I know some people would like the game since it's the equivalent of a summer movie with explosions and a lack of plot.  I like those movies as much as the next guy but to see something assembled in a ship-shod manner irks me...a lot.  This is only for the die-hard Ratchet and Clank fans.

5/10