Bargain Bin Ratchet & Clank
I really, really like Ratchet games. This one stinks. The whole idea, it seems, was to put out a small, download-only Ratchet & Clank game at a budget price. On paper I think this is an excellent idea, as I feel previous games in the series often bloated themselves with unnecessary features and minigames in order to justify their price point. Strip away all the chaff and give me a handful of solid run & gun levels and you'd certainly have something that's worth fifteen bucks.
The problem is, they did it backwards. There's very little running & gunning and a whole lot of dumb, infant-level puzzles. Including the tutorial, there are only five levels in the entire game, making Quest for Booty very short even for a download-only release from 2008. I can deal with a short game, but Quest for Booty completely fails to manage its short length well. After the tutorial, you lose all your guns and it takes one and half levels to get a single one back. That's nearly a third of the entire runtime! Instead of blasting my way through robot baddies, I spent an hour or so doing fairly by-the-numbers traversal challenges and walking down uneventful corridors while trading faux-witty, expositional banter with NPCs. Once you finally get a few of your weapons back and the story implies you're going to storm a pirate fortress, they dump you into a level where all of the tasks involve solving musical memory challenges to open locked doors.
When there is actual Ratchet & Clank shooter gameplay it's sub-par at best, with action setpieces that often involve standing in smallish, bland arenas and waiting for bad guys to spawn in. Furthermore, the difficulty and progression curves are jacked in a way that make things far less enjoyable. It feels like a game with systems that are meant to unfold over fifteen hours, but were awkwardly compressed into three and a half. Weapons still level up with use, in Ratchet and Clank tradition, but become fully powered-up after only tens of minutes of use. Ratchet starts out with ridiculously low HP, while the enemies always seem to have far too much.
Because of Quest for Booty's nature as a short downloadable, there are some significant changes to the systems. It's reasonable for there to be changes, but the specifics just don't work out. There are only seven weapons, and they're all recycled from Tools of Destruction. This in itself is understandable and would be fine by me, except some of the weapons they chose to carry over were crappy then and are still crappy now. This includes the Tornado Launcher, a weapon that requires use of the six-axis (no thanks), and the Shock Ravager, a terrible electric whip that freezes you in place when you use it AND requires you to be within melee distance. Given the HP bloat the major enemy types display, relying on the Shock Ravager is practically suicidal. Unlike other Ratchet games, you do not purchase weapons from vending machines. Instead you start the game with a full loadout, lose them all after the tutorial ends, and then slowly earn them back through story events. This robs the player's ability to choose their own loadouts and the feeling of owning their own progression. Even on a kinetic level, smashing crates feels completely pointless as bolts are now only used to purchase your way into the next mandatory progression beat. Aside from one bonus weapon that is also recycled from the previous game and is of limited usefulness, there is no reason to go out of your way to bust apart boxes and suck up bolts once you've got enough for the critical path. For a Ratchet game, that's just sad.
There are a few new ideas in Quest for Booty that doesn't feel like concessions, but they get shoved into your face constantly and without much payoff. First, your wrench can now be used to lasso onto objects and drag them around like a tractor beam. This is a neat idea, but its only accomplishment is that it massively slows down the pacing of the platforming sections and makes you awkwardly fiddle with the environment. The second involves picking small glowing creatures and using them to navigate dark caves full of bats. This is an okay puzzle element that is decently integrated, but they go back to it over and over and over and it hardly changes. And it all comes back to how this content interacts with the game's length: A very significant percentage of one's time spent with Quest for Booty dedicated to picking up balls of glowing snot and throwing them across pits to scare bats.
Instead of a smaller chunk of premium Ratchet & Clank fun for a smaller price point, Quest for Booty feels like a rushed, cheaply-made bargain bin version of Ratchet. I can't claim to know what resources went into the production, but that's what it feels like. I'd say it's the worst Ratchet game I've played to date, but I'd almost hesitate to call it a Ratchet game at all. It's severely lacking in all of the things I love about the series, and those things I didn't love so much but could put up with are magnified tenfold. Don't bother with this one, even if you like the series.
