Ratchet & Clank Future: Quest for Booty
Preview
The comic duo is back, showing the true strength of the PS3
by Chris Scott
previewed on PS3
Fourth Sequel
If you have been a Playstation 3 owner since launch, it has been a long wait for exclusive games that were worth playing. The games that -were- worthy playing had already appeared on the XBOX 360 and hardly gave you reason to feel proud of your Console. But over the last couple of months things have started to turn around for the system. The release of Warhawk and Heavenly Sword have spiked some life into Sony's technically powerful, yet software handicapped console. However neither of these games offers a big enough draw to get people really excited about the Playstation 3. That all might change come October as Insomniac games is poised to release the fifth console game in their immensely popular Ratchet & Clank series: Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction.
A short recap for those that are new to the Ratchet & Clank franchise is in order. The games feature the Lombax (upright standing, house cat looking alien species) Ratchet, a starship mechanic from the planet Veldin, and his robotic pal Clank as they are thrust into ridiculous scenario after ridiculous scenario attempting to save the world. The series first launched in November of 2002 and has since spawned three sequels on the Playstation 2, a mobile game, a PSP game and now finally the official fourth sequel to the original game, Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction. Ratchet & Clank are about as close to mascots as Sony has gotten since the heyday of Crash Bandicoot on the PSOne.
I was fortunate enough to get my hands on an early build of the game, and have since played through it. It is evident right off the bat that this game could not be made on a Playstation 2. The graphics have received a huge upgrade with Insomniac really taking the power of the Playstation 3 seriously. The opening cinematic is film quality, maybe not Pixar film quality but they do rival some of the recent Dreamworks stuff. The great thing about the cinematics is that, while pre-rendered, they are all in-engine.
Clank is back as Ratchet’s backpack
I have to give it to the developers; the game looks just as good in motion as it does in cinema. Fans of the series will be pleased to note that Clank is back in his familiar role of Ratchet’s gadget wielding backpack unlike the last game, Ratchet: Deadlocked, where he took a secondary role. Taking place in Metropolis, longtime series character Captain Quark alerts Ratchet and Clank about an attack. The two heroes set off to rescue the crazy Captain and we get to try out the control of the game as well as some new weapons and items.
Change in game control
Now there were a few hitches with the framerate but the demo was from the June 2007 build of the game and Insomniac has stated repeatedly that the game will run much smoother in the final version. The framerate issues were not enough to hamper the fun I had with the game though.
The biggest change other than the graphic upgrade was noticeable right away and it wasn’t something I liked noticing. The control scheme has changed, and in my opinion not for the better. It may have been that the changes were just more apparent to me because I just finished playing through Ratchet: Deadlocked but I felt that the game didn’t handle as easily as previous iterations. As I said earlier in regards to the graphics, this version I played was the June 2007 build and Insomniac has had some time to tweak things for the final product. Looking at Insomniac’s history, they most assuredly won’t allow the game to ship with lackluster control.
Fun new aspect of gameplay
Not everything about the control scheme bothered me though, as Insomniac has utilized the Six Axis functionality into a logical, functional and most importantly fun new aspect of gameplay. Upon falling long distances, the game shifts to what looks like a sky diver view. In your way will be obstacles -futuristic car traffic, like in Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones- that you will have to dodge by tilting the controller side to side or up and down. It actually works well and as long as the game doesn’t feature an over-abundance of these sequences they should work quite well.
The game will likely feature a whole new arsenal of weapons and gadgets as well as a solid mixture of platforming and shooting sequences that will keep you going through the games' many levels. I haven’t been able to discern a whole lot about the story but being as all the series iterations have had well told, witty stories I have no fear that Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction will be any different.
