[1001] Ratchet & Clank

The Ratchet & Clank series is now pretty well known, and has spawned a hell of a lot of games — cur­rently stand­ing at around 12 in all, with re-releases and ‘HD remakes’ still turn­ing up for the cur­rent gen­er­a­tion of con­soles. It’s a pop­u­lar series — and of course there’s good rea­son for that. Let’s look at 2 of the 3 that fea­ture in the 1001 list –

1001 No.62: ‘Ratchet & Clank’ (PS2, 2002)

The orig­i­nal game in the series was a rel­a­tively early PS2 title, com­ing out 2 years after the PS2 itself. But you’d never know it — it looks great, and even play­ing through it today I was sur­prised at the fram­er­ate and gen­er­ally impres­sive look of the game. The voice act­ing is well done, and the char­ac­ters of Ratchet (a weird kinda rab­bit alien thing) and Clank (a lit­tle robot dude) are rather love­able — it’s a nice comedic duo, and you do warm to them.

The premise is pretty sim­ple — you’re just some rab­bit thing mind­ing his busi­ness, when (with the arrival of Clank) you get caught up in a galac­tic strug­gle to save the uni­verse from a crazed evil alien, whose plan it is to build all over other people’s plan­ets. Basically a mad prop­erty developer.

It’s essen­tially just a plat­former, but with many dif­fer­ent kinds of fun weapons — so many that some­times it’s a pain just to cycle through them all. It’s sim­plis­tic, slightly lengthy if any­thing, but fun — and cer­tainly not with­out its chal­lenges. You can see why the series really took off, as it man­ages to tread that line of frus­tra­tion vs reward, with plenty of vari­ety to keep you hooked. You hop from planet to planet, shoot­ing bad guys and col­lect­ing 1000’s of bolts, which act as currency.

1001 No.63: ‘Ratchet & Clank: Tools of Destruction’ (PS3, 2007)

This new instal­ment of the series was the first to appear on the PS3, and so as expected takes advan­tage of the increased abil­i­ties of the sys­tem — it looks fan­tas­tic, and plays superbly. All the ele­ments are still there from the pre­vi­ous game — it’s the same kind of shooter/platformer, with an even big­ger arse­nal, more stuff to kill, more bolts to col­lect, and more plan­ets to visit. The sto­ry­line is noth­ing spe­cial either — another case of ‘save the galaxy’, this time from a crea­ture who seems deter­mined to exter­mi­nate your species.

On one hand you could say it is far too sim­i­lar, that it’s just ‘more of the same’ — and I’m pretty con­fi­dent that every Ratchet & Clank game plays pretty iden­ti­cally — but why change a win­ning for­mula? Obviously there are always a few new fea­tures, new weapons, etc — but it’s like any major gam­ing series — Zelda, Mario, Sonic — it’s consistent.

That’s not to say I’d put Ratchet & Clank up there with those giants of gam­ing — it’s great, sure — but it still does just feel like it’s miss­ing that spe­cial some­thing that would make it a real clas­sic series. Saying that, I will still give the many other titles a go someday…