The PS5 is a machine capable of incredible graphical power and processing speed, truly cutting edge. But why do I need that power or speed or edge? Today I'm playing NEO: The World Ends With You, a lower-budget game without 4K graphical or computational demands. It doesn't have ray-tracing, and less than 1K, it's an antique! The PS5 is the Ferrari of consoles and I'm driving under the speed limit. Since the Next Generation is unfolding slowly - and getting slower all the time - I might as well relax, because the PS5's power isn't going to get used for awhile.
By that logic, therefore, Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart from Insomniac Games is a no-brainer purchase. This is one of the only high-speed performance tracks you can drive your Ferrari console on. If you want to see the $400.00 to $500.00 investment you put into your PS5 white elephant, you have to buy Rift Apart. Nothing else on the PS5 looks this good, and probably nothing is going to look better for a long time. The next-gen revolution in graphics is here, and the rest of the industry won't catch up for awhile.
I'm not begrudging Rift Apart for cornering the market here. Ratchet & Clank's newest game is a technical achievement of astounding quality. In terms of raw graphical horsepower, it is the best looking game I've ever played. The awe never wears off. Rift Apart is as stunning in the last hour as it is in the first. The cartoony art style helps a lot here. Insomniac Games can fully show-off how well the PS5 can produce 4K pixels, sharp color, and ray tracing lighting effects without concern for the dull reality of realism. And as a game, Rift Apart is a nearly-perfect construct. It is a smooth, enjoyable experience from start to finish. The game costs $70, plus tax. I do miss that money I spent. But I have no regrets here.
Anyway, now that the consumer advice portion of this review is done, let me talk about why Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart is, underneath all the spectacle, deeply uninteresting.
Fun, Art, and The Art of Fun
Let me be clear, I like Rift Apart. I did just recommend it as an experience. But "experience" means a lot of things. Video games are a diverse medium and can achieve a lot of goals. Rift Apart achieves the goals Insomniac set out for it. It wants to be a fun ride and a strong showcase of Sony hardware. Ultimately, Ratchet & Clank is doing the same thing that the onboard demo game, Astro's Playroom, does. They're both charming experiences, but they exist mainly as demonstrations of the product. Actually I think Rift Apart does a lot less than Astro's Playroom, but that's a discussion for later.
Despite the obvious success of Ratchet & Clank, the game already feels like it has not left much of an impression. I bet it will make a lot of Top 10 lists at the end of the year. It might make mine. But Rift Apart only came out two months ago and already there is very little discussion happening. I have not read the great essays on the meanings of this game or the lingering emotions inspired by the characters. More than a million people bought this game, and there are no fights online or reinterpretations of the events. Nobody is showing off cool new ways to play. (This is all anecdotal of course, maybe I'm wrong.) What happened?
Rift Apart is shallow. Once you get beyond the graphics and technical mastery, this game is severely unambitious. It's interesting considering that Sony's big game of last year, The Last of Us Part 2, was full of ambition. Often deranged ambition. Sony as a company and brand can be relied upon to make technically perfect games. I don't doubt them on that front. But I also don't think Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart is ever going to be particularly memorable, or even wants to be.
I won't accuse Rift Apart of not being "art", because that's not an interesting discussion anymore. Whether video games are "art" has been a controversial subject in the past. Now it is a settled point. There is artistry and craft in all products, toys and games, and that all deserves your respect. I respect Rift Apart, a great deal. But that respect goes only as deep as the demonstrative power of the console. Games can be more than this. Rift Apart doesn't want to be; it only wants to be fun in a simplistic and easy way.
People play video games for a million reasons, the primary one is "having fun". Also, you can have fun a million ways. I'm not anti-fun, as much of an asshole as I come off sometimes. Being entertaining is a great quality to have. However, what else is a game doing? What stories is it telling? What effects is it having on the player? That's interesting to me. That's the kind of stuff I want to write about. Those effects can be good or bad. They should not be so neutral that ultimately you gain nothing from the experience. Nobody who plays Rift Apart will be changed afterwards. I can only imagine this game mattering a great deal to people who are very young and have not played many other games.
But why doesn't Rift Apart do anything else? Why isn't it inspiring that discussion? What is lacking in this game that seems to have everything?
Weightless Levity
Well, first off, in terms of story, Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart is shallow by design. I am unfamiliar with the greater lore of the Ratchet & Clank series. This is only the second game I've played in the whole franchise. But I don't think they're ever about heavy melodrama or socio-political commentary. This is a franchise about jokes. The franchise is a joke. This is a family-friendly cartoon universe that wants to be leisurely, witty, and inoffensive.
Within Rift Apart are pieces in the plot construction that could lead to drama and character studies. But Rift Apart chooses decidedly against them. We have two protagonists: Ratchet and his alternative universe female counterpart, Rivet. They're both "the last Lombax" (an anthropomorphic calico feline of some kind) of their respective realities until the universes are torn open by some science nonsense gone wrong. Ratchet and his robot partner Clank are the title characters, but really are not the protagonists of this tale. They have no arc and no drama.
The actually lead roles instead go to Rivet and her eventual robot partner, Kit. They are solid pieces of character design. There's a quiet vulnerability on Rivet's face that is always compelling. She's extremely cute. She works great as a protagonist in concept, yet nothing much happens with her.
Rivet has lived under a wacky supervillain's dictatorship for her whole life. She's distrustful of outsiders, and she has a surprisingly dark history with Kit. All those things could be the basis of an impactful and dramatic story. Yet they go nowhere. There are teases of a Ratchet and Rivet romance. (Parallel dimension self-cest would be very transgressive indeed, even the Plane Jane MCU has gone there by now thanks to the Loki show.) There's only a few small scenes of Rivet and robot antagonism. Her history under a clownish android dictator is never more than implication.
That means there's nothing to be afraid of. Nothing to worry about. Nothing to root for, even.
This is not that kind of game. Rift Apart will never push on the moments that could lead to real tension. Because ultimately most scenes are about the delivery of jokes. There's a few anti-capitalist lines about labor exploitation. One convent of alien mystics all have California surfer accents. There's a giant robot who is severely depressed. I can't really say any of these jokes are bad, per se. (Very few gags actually landed though.) However, the humor adds to make everything light and inconsequential.
Levity inflates this story to the point it's all without substance. It's so pleasant it doesn't matter.
Forgettably Friction-less
This goal of "pleasantness" extends down to the gameplay. Which is solid. It's friction-less and technically perfect. And none of it is very memorable.
Rift Apart is a solid third-person shooter. You play as Ratchet/Rivet and mow down horde upon horde of silly alien creatures or sillier doom robots. There's a solid arsenal of guns from your standard pee shooter and shotgun to more bizarre things like a sprinkler that turns enemies into topiary bushes or a missile that keeps bonking enemies on the head. The combat gives opportunities for ruthless mass slaughter or if you want, slapstick. I especially enjoy how the game's interdimensional conceit allows you to teleport around the battlefield. It's a kind of swashbuckling swing-effect that speeds up the action and gives you distance from your foes.
There's plenty more beyond the combat in Rift Apart too. There's impressive Sonic the Hedgehog-style high-paced rail-riding sequences. There's a couple hacking minigames that actually glitched quite a bit for me and were often unsolvable. (Ratchet & Clank is so well-made that the designers anticipated these problems and included an option to skip the puzzles entirely.)
Beyond the main campaign there's a world of collectables and a few side-missions, which are all very easily obtained. The map is reliable and readable. Rift Apart is not a long game, it feels very conscious of not wanting to wear to out its welcome. Most levels are only about an hour to ninety minutes long. Obtaining the Platinum 100% trophy is very doable.
The main goal Ratchet & Clank is not necessarily great action, but friction-less action. Insomniac did everything they could to avoid tedium. And it worked, it's never boring. Your time is never wasted. Yet, while Rift Apart is devoid of issues, it's also devoid of memorability.
It isn't even that the game is too easy. Ratchet & Clank has five difficulty settings that can set the game anywhere between "totally trivial" to "grotesque death march". I tuned the game up to the point that it was ruthless and beat my ass red for any minor mistake, where I had to be cautious with all my ammo. Yet none of that teeth-gnashing and nail-splitting made the individual encounters much more memorable than when it was on easy. I could spray and pray one-handed while also checking the Delta Variant's progress on Twitter, and this was as satisfying as the brutal mastery that Hard demanded.
There are no good boss fights or encounters that are more creative than just clearing out waves and waves of enemies. When the game tries to be more creative it introduces ideas like "now I'm a tower defense game" or "now you're in an arena and won't ever get health". That doesn't fix the issue, it just adds bullshit.
But again, Rift Apart is an incredible PS5 showcase. When you want to change gameplay, the SSD will spin up the new difficulty faster than you can leave the menu. You can change it mid-combat and enemies attacks will immediately become slower and less spicy. The game loads so fast that the sequences of hopping in your spaceship and flying to other planets are purely for visual effect. Under the hood, the game has already loaded the new planet.
This extends to gameplay, where you often jump between dimensions back and forth with impressive speed. However, while Rift Apart is loading quite a lot without hitching, it really doesn't do much for dual-world gameplay. Games like Skyward Sword could manage very similar effects ten years ago on the Wii - tech so out-dated it might as well run on Fred Flintstone's feet these days.
I wish there was more done with these ideas. But ultimately Insomniac kept to very safe goals of the old run and gun formula. They did know their strengths, I can't deny that. I just wish there was more here.
Sincerity and Accomplishment
A lot of games aim for charm and pleasantness. Mario never has had a story with a lot of depth. Nobody talks about the compelling character struggle of say, Yoshi. So certainly, Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart is not alone here in being shallow in places.
Visually, franchises like Mario and Dragon Quest are these bright happy Disney Worlds of fantasy and color. But under that friendly gloss, they're also demanding of your attention. Somewhere in the core of those designs is a serious commitment to either the gameplay or the characters or both. There's a demand from these games to pay attention to their stories and achieve something in the gameplay. You'll find something new and amazing in every Mario game, sometimes in every level. I never found that commitment in Ratchet & Clank. I beat this game but I don't feel particularly accomplished in its art. Whatever it was demanding of me, I never found it.
Even going back to Astro's Playroom, there's more there there. Astro's Playroom is embarrassingly sincere in its love for PlayStation history. Yeah, it's revisionist state propaganda from the Sony regime, I'm aware. But Playroom is also made from real aching fanboy love of this brand. Compared to Rift Apart, Astro's Playroom is shorter, has less content, and is just as much of a family-friendly toy chest in art style. It should be more shallow. However, Playroom instead accomplishes short but brilliant gameplay slices with the PS5's various gimmicks. Adaptive triggers being used for rock climbing was more creative and fun than all of Rift Apart combined.
So to me, Astro's Playroom is beautiful and honest, a truly great game. Where Ratchet & Clank can't commit to anything with such fervor. It undercuts any sincerity with a cheap gag. It undercuts its gameplay by making everything too simple, too obvious, and without creativity.
Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart is an extremely likable game. I bet most of the million+ people who bought this game liked it. It's a good product. It was a solid investment for Sony. However, while players might like this game, I don't know how many people will love this game. And that's the disappointing part for me.
My PS5 finally got to stretch her legs. But hopefully next time she stretches her legs, it will be with something with more ambition.
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