It isn’t fair for me to pass judgment on Ratchet & Clank: Full Frontal Assault because it was clearly intended as another attempt to make Ratchet & Clank multiplayer a thing. I only played the single player and the multiplayer community is long dead (I didn’t even check if the servers were up), though there is local multi if that’s your thing. Reviewing Full Frontal Assault based on its single player would be like reviewing Ryse: Son of Rome based only on the multiplayer. You don’t even know what the game really is and you definitely haven’t given it an opportunity to show you its best stuff. Nonetheless I am going to write about it because, well, I played it and I write these blogs for me.
This time the team at Insomniac seems to have taken inspiration from Brutal Legend and Sanctum (as well as the general concept of MOBAs) and made a hybrid third person shooter tower defense/RTS game, depending on the mode you’re playing. There is a single player/co-op mode with a story attached, but it’s even less consequential than the side story of All 4 One. The character stuff is also way pared down from that game, and this is the first Ratchet & Clank game I’ve played where it feels like Insomniac did not care about narrative. Even Deadlocked and All 4 One had substantial storytelling (All 4 One had almost as much story as a main line game, just not advancing the series ongoing plot) while this game’s feels cursory at best.
If the story is missing from the game, then at least the Ratchet & Clank gameplay is here, albeit in modified form. This is much more of a third person shooter than All 4 One was, with a zoomed out behind the back camera angle and dual stick controls. Ratchet feels zippy and using the hoverboots allows him to zoom around the terrain at a refreshingly fast clip. The weapons are greatest hits from prior games, but have persistent leveling across play sessions, which is a nice touch, and Ratchet can level up too, gaining health points and perks, as he progresses through the goals. The combat feels like a tighter version of Crack in Time’s, and there is some minor platforming and rail grinding to round out the Ratchet & Clank elements. It's still fun to wreck stuff with the buzz blades or make an army of bad guys dance to the Groovitron so the core shooting mechanics work fine, even if the braindead and repetitious enemies sap a lot of the fun out of the fighting. If you've ever wanted to destroy the same armored attack chopper over a dozen times then this game has you covered.
Where the game departs most from prior titles is in level design. The game takes place in relatively small arenas where you start in a base with some energy generators and two paths out into the rest of the level. In the remainder of that level are a bunch of enemies, some collectables like bolts, golden bolts, and weapon pods, and a series of objectives protected by force field generators. The gameplay loop involves going out into the level, grabbing resources and weapons, blasting force field generators until you break through to an objective, and rinsing and repeating until you unlock the final objective and can repeat the loop there. Meanwhile your base…does pretty much nothing the majority of the time. It sits there with some health and ammo pickups (you can find those in the field too) and looks pretty. On occasion, however, the game will inform you that all your base are about to belong to the enemy and unless you want to make your time you need to hustle back and defend it. There are teleporters throughout the level to take you back so it’s never a huge problem to get into a defensive position, and you can fortify the bases with turrets, barriers, and mines. That’s the only use for bolts in this game, with weapons being unlocked from pods each level.
Defending the base during the level is slightly annoying but relatively harmless, mostly serving to yank you out of your assault to rush back and blast a few waves of weaklings or one strong enemy like a tank. You need to rush back because your base defenses are, to put it mildly, a bit crap. The turrets can do a little bit of damage and the single use mines a little more, but even with a lot of them they never seem to take out even half of a wave, and they are extremely brittle and vulnerable to attack by enemies, meaning that massive bolt investments can be wiped away in seconds if you’re not babysitting them. The generators are also very vulnerable, but at least they can be repaired for money.
These issues all come to a head after you’ve activated the final objective, when the game pulls you back to base for a final series of assaults that’s much bigger than anything you’ve faced previously. It’s not unmanageable but it’s frustrating because the waves come down two separate lanes and if you’re playing solo there’s just no way to keep them both clear at the same time. This means that your defenses inevitably get hammered and by the end you have almost nothing left. This is made worse by the fact that you get very few bolts for killing enemies in this game; they’re almost all acquired from boxes in the field (especially in the earlier levels), so you can’t replace what’s been damaged. In the end I always lost one or more generators to this final attack because I just didn’t have enough firepower to keep things clear. The game rewards you for certain subgoals, including a par time that I never came close to and keeping all your generators, so I found this frustrating, even though checkpointing and respawns meant that I didn’t actually lose all my progress from the levels (which are on the long side, with even par times often exceeding half an hour.) These goals become more achievable if you grind a little bit to get your persistent weapon levels up and raise your damage output, but I had zero interest in revisiting prior levels that were boring enough the first time.
The game isn’t unplayable or broken, but it feels poorly balanced for single player. If you got more bolts from killing enemies so you could repair more effectively during the final phase, or if your defenses were more durable (or even better couldn’t be destroyed) or if the multiple pathways funneled into each other so there was a central area where you could make a stand without exposing your generators… whatever. The single player is supposed to be functional and it is, but it’s not the focus of the package. Complaining about the balancing of perfunctory single player content in a $20 (now $10) downloadable multiplayer game is pointless.
I will say that the last two single player levels do attempt to mix things up with an escort mission in level 4 (not as bad as it sounds) and a fifth level that features no base building, just an all out assault followed by a pretty good final boss battle. These levels do provide some much needed relief for the tedium, but by the time you get to them the basic loops of the game have worn out their welcome. The boss battle does mean that the game ends on something of a high note and is worth playing the final level just to experience, but it's not worth it to play the four levels you have to slog through to get there.
The multiplayer seems to have two modes. One is just the single player in co-op (where having two separate paths for the assaults makes more sense and would be much easier to deal with) and the other is more of a full blown RTS, where you go out and capture nodes to gain income and then purchase offensive units to send against the opposing player(s) etc… That’s probably where the meat of the game’s design went, and while I doubt it would have captivated me even when the game was released it kind of made sense during the beginning of the MOBA craze to try something like this.
It’s worth noting that this is yet another Ratchet and Clank game with technical problems. The framerate drops into the single digits when you’re lobbing grenades or other AOE weapons at large groups of enemies, and I had two hard locks of my PS3 during the few hours it took me to get through the campaign. Yes this is a downloadable game that retailed for $20 originally, but it’s also a Sony published game that has to patch multiple times before it will run at all, so you'd think they would have at least made it work. Nope. Then again this thing reviewed poorly for an R&C game and doesn't seem to have sold well so it's not shocking that they left the unloved single player in a bad state.
At this point Full Frontal Assault is just an old curiosity. I bought it because I wanted all the Ratchets & Clanks, and I played it because I was going through the series and it’s now or never.
As it turns out, sometimes never is the better choice.
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