Not the Best Ratchet, But Still Really Good!
The Ratchet games are some of the best shooters you can play on a console. This seems unintuitive since they are half-mascot platformer, but it works because it uses lessons from the 3D platformer genre effectively. Being a mascot platformer, it wants you to do a lot of jumping around. So instead of hiding behind cover and aiming down the sights, the game forces you to dodge and weave around enemy projectiles (there are NO hitscan enemies) with flips and careful coordination. It has health pickups hand-placed around the level because what Mario game has regenerating health? Mascot platformers have, since the Nintendo 64 days, been about gathering an expanding arsenal of new moves, so why limit the number of weapons you can carry? This game has a quick select inventory with 24 slots. Mascot platformers are all about exploring a variety of worlds, so here there are a whole bunch of levels with wildly different geometry and visual styles.
Tools of Destruction specifically is certainly not the best one in the series, however. It's not the worst either, but it feels like they had to rebuild the game from the ground up in the move from the Playstation 2 to the PS3 and in the process lost a few of the lessons they learned by iterating. The camera sometimes goes a little haywire-- disastrously so in one sequence where you're on an airship and the camera locks itself into a fixed position despite the game being otherwise tailored for the behind-the-back viewpoint. They've tried to split the economy between the traditional bolts (money) and weapon upgrade material, but the end result is such a deep surplus of bolts that they feel worthless. Some of the weapons are just stinkers, which is to be expected when the game has around 15 of em, but previous games had a better batting average overall.
A few of the later levels felt a bit under-playtested, with some undercooked, slightly-too-cheap bosses and bad checkpoints that force you to replay boring side-activites if you die. This is the biggest problem with Ratchet and is one mascot platformer trope that I wish they had done away with: The idea that the player will get bored without dumb side activities that distract from the core gameplay loop. There are locked doors that require you to use the six axis motion controls to roll a marble through a timed maze. There are locked doors that require you to use the six axis to do a dancing minigame. To be fair, you can disable the six axis aspect entirely, but that doesn't exactly solve the problem. You're still solving the most boring task possible ("unlock a door") using slow, repetitive, laborious, and sometimes surprisingly challenging minigames to accomplish it. I understand the designers' need to throttle the action up and down, but these minigames stop your momentum like a brick wall.
I've focused mostly on what I didn't like, mostly because what I did like is stuff that's been true about the series since 2003. The mainline Ratchet & Clank games are really good. They're some of the best shooters to hit consoles ever, and this is another one of them. I recommend it.
