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dkirschner's Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction (PS3)
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| [November 17, 2013 11:55:32 AM]
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I think this was my first Ratchet & Clank game. If I played one back on PS2, then I have no memory of it. The clever titles make me think I’ve played them all though because I always remember “Up Your Arsenal” and a couple others. I hardly ever play games like this, silly cartoony platformers. R&C reminds me of Mario, Sly Cooper, Sonic…games like those. One of the two things that kept me from giving the game a 10/10 was the humor. Some of it was funny but some was too silly (pretty much everything about Captain Qwark), venturing into kid game territory. The other negative, just to get it out of the way, is a UI issue. It’s very easy to select the wrong weapon in an otherwise brilliant weapon selection system. Pressing triangle pauses the action and brings up the weapon select menu, an octagonal menu with each point mapped to a direction on the D-pad (up, down, left, right and all the diagonals). Pressing L1 or R1 while the menu is up switches pages. There are 3 pages each with 8 customizable slots. 24 easy-to-access weapons, items and abilities on a console? Yes, please! The problem is that when you choose a weapon, the selection sometimes doesn’t stick. Diagonals are particularly prone to the problem. Trying to press up-right, for example, very often bounces around from up-right to just up or right and you wind up with the wrong weapon when you exit the menu. It’s hard to explain exactly what happens in writing, but the feeling of it is that the D-pad for the menu is too jittery and there needs to be some way to lock your selection so it doesn’t ‘slip’ as you release triangle and exit the menu. It happened the entire game so I don’t think it was me.
Otherwise, this game was pretty amazing. It took a little getting used to how cartoony it was. Now I appreciate the colorfulness. There’s creativity oozing from the game. The animation is great, enemy and weapon design also a high point. TONS of weapons, very zany armory R&C carry around with them. One is a tornado launcher, and then you control the tornado with the Sixaxis controller. The game makes very cool use of the Sixaxis by the way, something that the Xbox 360 controller was really lacking. Of course that’s moot now that the next gen is underway. Another weapon was an insect swarm. I killed the last boss in about 15 seconds by tossing out insect swarms and blasting him with some mega charge weapon. There were creatures you could toss on the ground that would attack enemies who got near, auto-locking rockets, a crazy disc launcher that ricocheted buzzsaws everywhere. There were also all kinds of neat gadgets and the hacking game was cool, reminded me of Marble Madness. Just a lot of fun stuff!
Another high point was the puzzle sections with Clank. There are these mysterious robot things called Zoni that help Clank when he’s alone. Their actions are mapped to the D-pad too. Approach some when you find them and select “follow” and they spring to life and follow. When something, say a platform you need to cross, can be repaired, select “manipulate” and they fix it up. When something needs to be charged select “charge up” and they will charge it. They also attack enemies. When you need to jump far, select “levitate” and they help you float for a few seconds over obstacles. All this made for some interesting puzzles, but unfortunately none too difficult. I watched a review of A Crack in Time, which the internet says is the best R&C game, and those Clank puzzles look even more awesome because you can manipulate time and copies of Clank. It looks like The Swapper. Anyway, count me a fan of a series I didn’t know I liked!
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dkirschner's Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction (PS3)
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Current Status: Finished playing
GameLog started on: Sunday 10 November, 2013
GameLog closed on: Saturday 16 November, 2013 |
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