It's almost time for a new...*drum roll*...PS5 exclusive and this time it's one I've been waiting for since 2016! Well, techincally I've been waiting for it since the official reveal, but I've wanted a new Ratchet & Clank game for much longer, way before 2016 even, I guess, since the last one we got was a remake. Still gotta wait until friday, but at least the reviews are telling me that the weekend's going to be a very good one.

• Eurogamer- Recommended
• Easy Allies - 8.5/10
• Gameinformer 9/10
• Gamespot 9/10
• IGN - 9/10
• Polygon
• Pushsquare 8/10
• The Sixth Axis 9/10
• Vice

It sounds like Rift Apart is not necessarily breaking the R&C mold in a big way, but still adds enough fun new tricks to refresh it, so for people who've enjoyed the series in the past, it's probably going to be a bullseye. I know I've enjoyed just about all of the games so far, so I'm well pumped to spend my whole weekend glued to my couch and tv with a completely new adventure.

Very excited to play this game in the spring of 2023. Unless I'm enshrouded in anxiety over a mid-generation console refresh by then!

You, sir, just caused my brain to do some flips. Not because of the scores or anything of that sort, but suddenly remembering that we're nearing halfway into 2021, and that CANNOT be possible.

@hansberg: You know, I knew we were in June, but put that way, I am now also feeling a little bamboozled. Lingering covid time dilation still in affect.

The first big PS5 exclusive. Great to see it get such strong reviews. Not enough for me to get a PS5 yet, but it looks fun.

The “more of the same but prettier” consensus is disappointing. I have a strong desire for a Playstation 5 exclusive that actually takes advantage of the hardware, but based on my experience of the 2016 remake, the Ratchet gameplay loop does nothing for me and $70 is way too steep for just a graphical showpiece. Between this and Returnal (all my least favorite mechanics in one game!) being the banner PS5 exclusives this year, I’m glad I have a sizable backlog of PS4 games with next gen patches to work through.

This has been my number 1 reason to get a PS5 and once I get one, you better believe I'm spending 70 bucks to get Rift Apart. Not entirely a fan of the price but I don't want to miss out on this title. The Ratchet and Clank series has always been my favorite Sony 1st party series and its great to know that this title might be the best game in the series yet.

I'm pumped for this. It and Psychonauts 2 are my most hyped games of the year. The "more of the same" but next gen is exactly what I want it to be. Especially when that new coat of paint looks so damn nice.

anyone else trying to fuck that hot ratchet?

I buy these games, enjoy them a bunch, then stop halfway through for reasons unknown. It looks cool but I fear like I'll do the same here.

Looks incredible. Now it's time to begin staring at Wario64 on Twitter waiting for them to say someone has PS5s available.

Decided to pre-order it the moment first trailer came out, can't wait.

I like these games and I'm even kind of happy that they're good but not all that different because they're comfort food. But I've basically given up on getting a PS5 until probably 2022 or even 2023.

Counting down hours to tomorrow now. Gonna keep my eyes shielded from this trailer myself though.

Didn't get hyped for naught, fortunately! I'm not sure how many hours I've put in so far, but I've loved basically every second of what I've played. This thing is just joyous to look at and play, really can't stress that fact enough. I'm sure it would be just fine in the Fidelity mode too, but I haven't looked back once after turning on the Performance+RT mode. Think I can safely rank this as my favorite R&C to date, unless something terrible happens towards the end of it.

Together with Returnal, this is setting up the bar real high for PS5 exclusives, when it comes to just how smooth and good it feels to play.

Its a really really pretty game, buts its more of the same which is not necessarily a bad thing.

It's unfortunately missing the level of polish that I expect from a Ratchet game; hoping there are some patches to fix things. I'm talking about things that, frankly, should not have passed QA.

I made a custom controller layout to make it more like some of the older R&C games and the game is roughly 60:40 on whether it actually updates the UI/HUD button prompts to your custom layout or whether they're just hardcoded. At least once or twice per planet now (I'm like fiveish in?) I've had to just start mashing buttons to try to figure out what button the game wants me to press because the tutorial prompt isn't showing the right one. The custom controller layout screen also seems to change or not change the buttons/button combos for the 'miscellaneous' functions (handbrake, wrench throw, etc.) depending on which order you swap the buttons in (i.e. if I highlight L2 and swap it with O, it might change the wrench throw button combo, but if I highlight O and swap it with L2, it might not).

Some of the accessibility options are busted, too: I changed the hoverboots to toggle rather than hold, but they instantly cut out any time I go over a jump. This made some of the ramps/jumps over chasms on the planet where you get them impossible unless I was holding down the hoverboots button (even though I had it set to toggle), which prevented them from cutting out.

Plenty of other little/minor bugs too that aren't anything by themselves but slowly add up, like the hoverboots turning on but having me stuck in place 5-10% of the time until I disable/reenable them, or Ratchet getting stuck in the environment for about 45 seconds when I tried to grapple onto one of the things flying around with a gold bolt on that same planet, or the map objectives list staying popped up over the other pages in the menus, or the collectibles page not clearing its 'you have something new' notification even though I've scrolled over/played everything, etc.

Just beat it yesterday and am going through Challenege mode to get the last few trophies I need, and level the Omega weapons. If this isn't my favourite game in the series, it is certainly up there. I've hit some real bad bugs that have crashed my whole PS5 (twice in fact), but with that being said. I still think it's an awesome game. Fun to play, the new/alt universe characters are great, and the story is real fun too. Super solid game and a real return to form after 2016 missed on so many fronts

All in all, exceeds expectations for another Ratchet title, but I was astounded in terms of how many bugs and jank I ran into. It was distracting enough that I have to comment on it. Thankfully the game checkpointing systems and so forth are forgiving enough that it didn't have as much impact, but in other circumstances, I think a lot of people would not be giving this so much of a pass.

Wish they spent at least a month cleaning this up--almost hard to believe how rough around the edges this is.

Even moment-to-moment gameplay has way too many distracting flaws. After switching weapons in the middle of combat (something you often do), your first shot will sometimes go in a really weird direction and miss. Also collision and hitboxes on shots tends to be weird in some circumstances in general (wish I had clipped how many shots just go straight thru enemies).

I've had more than a few situations where the gun wouldn't fire, or the reticle wouldn't appear, or I wouldn't be able to L2 to zoom in with the Headhunter (though that might apply to other guns, I don't L2 much besides with that one).

Tons of geometry collision jank, especially in the swamp world. I've died instantly due to running into a weird corner or similar a few times.

While probably not a bug, but still demonstrative in terms of the overall polish: it was really easy to fall between gaps near the middle of the arena battles, in stages where the center is lava. I'm not talking about literally going into the middle and taking damage from lava. The platforms that comprise the area around the lava have rounded corners, and several times I fell into the lava pit between the rounded corners. OK, git gud and all, stay away from that area--you're right. But that should really be more forgiving in a title like this, otherwise it feels cheap and jank--don't let the player character fall into gaps smaller than the character model--should be a given, you'd think.

Scripting issues too. Cutscenes not firing and preventing progress, had to load from checkpoint when I realized it was a bug, more than one occasion. Trophy issues too, I have bought all the guns (100% the game--all collectibles and so forth) but don't have Fully Stacked.

Only one visual/graphical bug, had the top of KT's glass domes on her head turn into large black pixels in a few cutscenes. Went away when I restarted the game, and in general, I feel as though performance dropped over time (played exclusively in Performance RT mode).

Anyway, this might seem like a litany of nitpicks, but it definitely added up. For real, my playthrough was somewhat marred by dumb shit in what was otherwise a really fun experience. I was playing a videogame for sure, not a Pixar movie. Wish the gameplay had the level of polish that the creative elements (art, modeling, animation, level of detail, etc.) have.

Forgot to mention the scripting bugs in my other comment: I missed basically all of the character development/backstory of Kit and Ratchet because the dialogue kept skipping (sometimes a character would randomly (i.e. unprompted) say a line that was very clearly a response to an immediate previous line that I didn't hear at all) or cutting out (enemies or other NPCs would start talking and cut off the conversation the characters were having, and then those lines would never be replayed or the conversation would continue later as if all of what was skipped had been played).

I also had the 'Kit's domes got pixelated in several cutscenes' bug; also on Performance RT.

I've played a bunch of the game and not yet finished it. As someone who has played all the prior console games in the series I think that objectively this is probably the best one (at least if you ignore the technical issues, which I assume will get patched) but I'm a little cooler on it than I expected.

I think that while it looks absolutely incredible they have long reached the point of diminishing returns on ramping up the technical quality on their art style and I kind of prefer some of the prior games because it was easier to make out the enemies in less busy environments. This is especially a problem in areas with civilian robots, though they use contrasting colors to help clarify things some.

I also think that the weapons are not as funny as in prior games, though they're still pretty good.

It took me a bit to warm up to Kit and Rivet, and I'm disappointed that the two pairs play exactly like each other. I was hoping that they would have somewhat different arsenals or handle differently or have different traversal abilities or something. Instead it's just a reskin. Also not super happy with the way they split up Ratchet and Clank yet again for a big chunk of game. The pair are literally the title characters but they seem to always get separated! I do like Rivet and Kit independent of those issues, and overall the story and characters are pretty strong for this series. Gary is a great addition, and Mrs. Zurkon gets her own identity, which is nice.

There's less of an emphasis on gadgets and puzzles than there has been, and in some ways this series has become almost a pure shooter with a few platforming/grinding challenges thrown in. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it does feel like something is missing. I'm not saying that the game would be better with The Trespasser or the Hydrodisplacer, I'm just saying it's different.

The technical issues are pretty annoying. Level geometry and collision are messed up enough that the game is programmed to move you back into a 'safe' position if you get stuck in the geometry, and it's easy to do given how dark a lot of areas are. I had a bug where Mrs. Zurkon wouldn't sell to me and I didn't realize it was a bug at first because I thought maybe she wanted me to finish the mission before shopping, but nope, she was just broken. I also had a bug where the game locked up and wouldn't accept inputs after I tried to view a preview of a weapon. I also think I managed to get stuck at one point by using a Blizon crystal and I had to restart a checkpoint.

The sound mixing is also terrible. How do developers STILL not know how to make dialog audible? It's 2021! I don't want to use subtitles but I have to because the combat is so loud it overwhelms the dialog, and there are lots of areas where you can miss dialog by moving and triggering new dialog from someone else, which is a pet peeve.

But despite all these problems, it's a really solid Ratchet and Clank game. It plays very well, it has pretty good level design including two large open areas (which are bafflingly placed directly next to one another instead of pacing them out) good weapons, good encounter design, etc... Bosses are not good but bosses have never been a strength of the series. I would say the bosses were better in the 2016 remake game though.

I have nit picks because the underlying base of Ratchet & Clank is generally so good that it feels kind of silly to say "the shooting feels really good, the upgrades are a ton of fun, the script is lighthearted and funny, it's all very polished and pleasing, there's a lot of variety in the gameplay" etc, but all that stuff is true.

And it does look spectacularly good.

I will say that the dualsense integration felt very gimmicky. I was kind of disappointed by that. I am thinking that Astro's Playroom made promises that other developers just won't be able to make good on, and this is going to be another gimmicky Sony controller that gets shoehorned into some first party games but doesn't end up meaning much. Maybe that's not the case and this game was just too deep into development to actually integrate this stuff deeply.

Just wanted to note that there are individual audio sliders in the options; they were one of the first things I had to dig for, because yeah, the sound effects are wayyyyyy louder than the dialogue by default.

@ajamafalous: This obviously helps, but it doesn't fully fix the issue because NPCs have positional audio where they get softer the further they are from you. This means that even with the sliders set well if you're walking through a crowd you might hear the beginning of an exchange but not the whole thing if you don't stop and listen, which is obviously intended. More annoyingly, however, there are a lot of characters who as soon as you meet them will start pathing to some new location while you might not have had a chance to explore the room and look for pick ups and secrets yet (Which are a huge part of the game.) If you follow the NPC you can end up in a situation where you get temporarily locked out from backtracking and finding stuff you may need, like ammo, but if you don't follow then the conversation fades to an inaudible level, especially when you're smashing stuff to collect pickups.

I realize this is a nit-pick, I just don't understand how developers themselves have never played games and said "oh I can't hear what ANYONE is saying, I should fix that" and figured out solutions, like having NPCs follow YOU around while they're talking, or only fading the audio a little bit when they move away from you but keeping it at an audible level so the NPC isn't just talking to themselves. Or waiting until you move back to where they are to continue talking.

It's just one of those things that seems obvious to me and is a problem in so many games despite there being a lot of solutions available and implemented into other games.

Yes, I mentioned the bad dialogue problems in my earlier post; I just meant specifically the audio balance of the dialogue versus the sound effects and music.

Fortunate enough to have access to a PS5, I can't wait to see this running. I don't think videos do the transitions justice because Astro's Playroom looked a lot better in person as well.

Reading a lot of these posts I'm surprised this game scored so many 9's. It seems like this game has some near Days Gone levels of bugs going on which dinged that game hard on release. Did review copies work better or something. Seems strange that so many folks here have encountered problems yet reviews don't seem to reflect that.

@spacemanspiff00: Honestly a 9 seems reasonable despite the issues. Unlike in a game like Days Gone where bugs can be extremely frustrating, Ratchet & Clank is so forgiving in general that it's rarely more than a minor annoyance. You might have to reset a checkpoint or you might miss part of a conversation but it's not a huge deal.

I also think people are more forgiving of bugs during Covid, when it's harder to develop games, and also because the studio did not crunch. Minor bugs are a good trade off for not killing your employees.

It's also getting a bit of a boost for being one of the few big PS5 exclusives, and being one that definitely looks like it could not have been a PS4 game. If this came out 2 years from now after the COVID crisis and mid-generation I think it would likely be getting less forgiving scores.

I was going to say that I've been very lucky with bugs and have only encountered one that required me to restart from a checkpoint, but then just today I had a Glitch section freeze up both the game and system and I had to hard reset the console. Not a huge problem though, didn't lose progress and the game starts up super quick.

The game is definitely not doing anything that would make it wildly different from the previous games in the series, but what it does it just nails (in my opinion) so I really don't have much to complain about personally. Well, except that it'll probably be over tomorrow and I'm not sure how long it'll take before I get to play something new that's even half as enjoyable as Rift Apart.

As someone who has bounced off the series pretty hard before this, I'm really enjoying my time with it. I don't know if it's purely the visuals or what, but this could end up being the cipher key I needed to understand what people see in these games.

For what it's worth, the only bug I've run into so far is a UI element sticking around on the menu screen for a bit longer than it should have.

Now that I've finished it I can definitely say it's my favorite game in the series, and I've played all of the console entries. It's not flawless but it's pretty great, and while the final boss fight isn't mechanically great it is maybe the most "spectacular" ending I've ever experienced in a game. It really feels like a big budget animated film and it's the kind of focused single player experience that's getting rarer and rarer; a game where pretty much every moment is fun and engaging and there's very little fat and few lulls in the action.

I thoroughly enjoyed it.

It's also the easiest and most accessible game in the series. I even managed to build the R.Y.N.O., which I have never done before.

I hope it does well commercially. I really want to get another one of these this generation. I'd say that I probably had more fun with this than Miles Morales, though I know that's where Insomniac's focus is probably going to be headed moving forward.

@spacemanspiff00: Most bugs are easy to forget/forgive when the game checkpoints constantly and reloads in 2 seconds.

Platinumed the game yesterday.

I think, after having finished it, that the only complaint I really have is the length and difficulty. The best thing about these complaints are that they are, at the very least, subjective. Personally though, I found the game surprisingly short and easy in all aspect, especially in regards to platinum. Not only combat, which was somewhere between easy and fine for my taste, but finding all collectibles and earning money as well.

Aside from the aforementioned difficulty issue, I had very few other issues and bugs. Nothing that wouldn't resolve with just a quick checkpoint load, which was insanely fast. Graphics looks really good and the game was smooth at all points for me.

For me this felt more like an appetizer. The game does really well in making me both want and be more optimistic about more Ratchet and Clank. All in all I am in other words fairly happy. And while I think the game was too short, I can understand that for some people this length is good or even ideal. All this said, I would rather have a short and great game like it is now, than for it to become too long and a burden to complete.

@blommer4: I'm not sure what you expected in length. According to "How Long to Beat" it's pretty normal for a Ratchet and Clank game, a little over 10 hours. I agree that the extras (gold bolts, other collectables) are easier and take less time to get than in most R&C games, but in terms of the main story it's pretty much in line with the rest of the series.

Currently playing it.

It's a great game. In a lot of ways, its more of the same formula, but if you're a fan of that formula then you'll enjoy this latest entry. The new guns are fun to use, and I like how the gameplay is done so you'd have to use many different weapons, because ammo is a lot less than in the other games. So no more powering up one weapon and cruising through the game like in past entries.

As much as I liked the 2016 remake, one of the cons against it was that is was too easy, even on the hardest difficulty. This game is more challenging in a lot of ways. Riven, Kit, and Glitch are great new characters with endearing personalities and back stories. The graphics are amazing and really look next-gen like they are supposed to. I'm actually conflicted on whether I should play in Fidelity 30fps mode which is a full visual treat, or the Performance RT mode which is 60fps with ray-tracing intact, but a little less of the other graphical effects and lower resolution. So I've been switching back and forth while playing it.

Overall, its a very good R&C game, another winner by Insomniac.

@bigsocrates: It's not that I expected more, but that I wanted more.

I was well aware of the length before I bought the game, but I still wish it would take longer to platinum it. This is just a testament to how good the game is though - I would love to have more to play.

@av_gamer: glad to hear I'm not the only one swapping back and forth between Fidelity and Performance RT. I don't know if I sit too close to my TV or something, but the resolution drops on PerfRT are sometimes severe and I appreciate the crispness of Fidelity.