This, my friends, is the way of the future. They've been speaking of it for a while. When games would suddenly make some huge leap forward in design. When they would 'evolve'. The truth is, for some games, it's already happened. And this is one of them. Ratchet and Clank was created by Insomniac games and is, on face, an action adventure sci-fi buddy flick staring a furry mechanic and his overly formal mini-robot friend Clank. The game chronicles their adventures through the galaxy, saving it from the evil Drek and having fun while doing so. In reality, it's whatever it needs to be alongside that. It clearly has a solid root in platformer gaming with generally good secret design and good grasp of theme, but it's also a racing game, a stunt tony-hawk game, and a few other things besides. The developers really had a solid grasp of thinking outside of their genre to add segments that worked into the thematics of the game and were fun to play.
Graphically and musically, the game is a feast. Lush colorful character models, excellent contrasts, great art direction throughout the game and generally a feeling of actually walking around the place. The music is largely atmospheric and it fits well, contributing skillfully to the game's presentation and feeling in the way more up front music would not have.
The gameplay, overall, is superb. The controls are pretty much rock solid, the in game help is quite possibly the best I've ever seen in a video game covering with visuals pretty much anything you'd possibly want to know (Truly an awesome display). The 'worlds' generally break up into a few distinct paths with their own adventure behind them, plentiful automatic checkpoints, and pretty much minimal forced repeating of large chunks with each of them ending with some method for getting right back to the world exit point and leaving either a teleporter or a cab behind to make it easy to get back if you want to. The game was clearly built to be 'fun' to play first and foremost, not to be 'difficult'. This isn't to say it doesn't have hard components, but that's never the focus. The difficult is just built up over a very smooth slope. You'll have a weapon for pretty much any situation you can encounter and there are plenty of fanciful weapons with their own functionality. Nicely, they added in extra 'skill point' challenges that are revealed once you've beaten the game for things a completionist can have fun doing (though you can start getting them whenever) alongside superweapons that can be bought. The game also offers a sort of new game + mode to go through it with the weapons you already had. Always a winner.
The game isn't perfect though. I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that the bolts (the monetary currency of the game) get way too stingy mid-to-end game and eventually there is no good way to get enough money for the last ten weapons or so without cheating or utilizing game glitches. While these aren't necessary for beating the game, it's an annoying trait in it. Additionally while the game design is fluid and grand for most the levels, the very last level totally drops the ball. It's easily the worst designed level in the game. Huge areas between checkpoints, long spots of playing "Oh my weapon can hit behind walls which your infinite range laser cannon cannot!" Lots of just messy bits with that. To put it in perspective, despite all the fun I'd had with the earlier game, I literally put it down because I concluded that 'while I can do this, it's no longer a game of fun. It's a game of memorizing everything'. Brian talked me into giving it one last run in which I pretty much reflexively killed everything, winning their little memory+positioning game but basically, it was clearly a rush job, without a lot of balancing and testing.
Finally the story, while not as ear bleedingly bad as many recent ones I've encountered, is kind of weakly delivered at a fair number of points. This doesn't detract from the fact it's still a stellar game, but it's sort of sad to see it didn't get the writing polish there that it deserved.
Dracos
Is this Ratchet and Clank 1?
I recently got a demo of Ratchet and Clank 3 with a ps2 magazine (now that I have a nice new shiny ps2 :D ) and playing through that was an absolute blast. I'm almost certainly going to get a copy when a) it comes out and b) I have any money.
Yes, this was the first game he was reviewing.