[E3 2008] Ratchet & Clank: Quest for Booty
Yarrrrgh. We be gettin' our hands on Insomniac's downloadable continuation of Tools of Destruction.
Published: July 25, 2008
We have a theory around here: Insomniac games is staffed entirely by robots. All the awesome personalities there, all the people we've come to know and love, are, in fact, a bunch of tireless machines that just code non-stop until a game is done. It's the only way we can explain how they're able to not only crank out a brand new game every single year and maintain the level of polish that they do. Resistance: Fall of Man hit at launch and is still being played online to this day. Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction arrived a year later and in less than four months, we'll have another Resistance, complete with a separate 8-player co-op mode, tons of online stuff and a huge single-player game. See? Robots.
Need more proof? Okay, fine. Somehow in between Ratchet: ToD and Resistance 2, Insomniac managed to squirt out Ratchet & Clank: Quest for Booty (or will in just a few weeks; the game is essentially done). It's inhuman, and from what we played of the game at E3 this year, it maintains the same level of polish -- maybe even looking slightly better than the first PS3 Ratchet game, yet arrives at the low, low price of $15 for what amounts to a few hours of game. Robots, dude. Robots.
What was truly interesting about Quest for Booty was that it seemed to be a little less weapons-heavy and a lot more platformy, which is a ratio that we fully support. The series has, as a whole, started to tip a little too heavily into pew pew territory for our tastes (though we still loved Tools of Destruction, obviously), and Booty looks like it'll pull the needle back the other way. We got about 20 minutes of good, solid hop 'n bop time with the game and were pleasantly surprised.
See, Ratchet, chasing a decidedly Clank-like could-be hallucination after being shipwrecked has lost all his delightful toys, which sort of takes the game back to its roots. Armed only with his trusty Omni-Wrench and the newfound ability to fire out the tip to create an electricity tether to reel things in or deploy platforms, he sets out to help the denizens of this new land on their quest to re-power a set of five turbines. Though the actual means of doing so changes from turbine to turbine, the end goal is the same: get to the top, turn the crank and get teleported back to the ground nearby.
It's the perfect foil for all of Ratchet's classic bits of gameplay; you've got your elaborate grind rail sections, your gravity boot segments where Rachet walks vertically up the side of the turbine towers, and even just some good ol' fashioned scaling of a series of platforms, wall shimmies and so on. All of these segments made liberal use of the new wrench mechanic to pull down spring-loaded platforms, rotate others so they were flat enough for Ratchet to jump on and more. It made for some of the tightest, most pure bits of platforming we've ever played in the series, and if the rest of the experience can live up to these moments (remember, we didn't even do that much combat), then we're going to be very happy when the game drops.
Tentatively that's just "this Fall," but at least we have a few screens and movies for you to drool over in the mean time, and we have it on good authority that the game will be hitting the PlayStation Store in just a few weeks. As soon as we've been able to take the whole game through its paces, we'll report back right here. Because we love you that much.
Need more proof? Okay, fine. Somehow in between Ratchet: ToD and Resistance 2, Insomniac managed to squirt out Ratchet & Clank: Quest for Booty (or will in just a few weeks; the game is essentially done). It's inhuman, and from what we played of the game at E3 this year, it maintains the same level of polish -- maybe even looking slightly better than the first PS3 Ratchet game, yet arrives at the low, low price of $15 for what amounts to a few hours of game. Robots, dude. Robots.
What was truly interesting about Quest for Booty was that it seemed to be a little less weapons-heavy and a lot more platformy, which is a ratio that we fully support. The series has, as a whole, started to tip a little too heavily into pew pew territory for our tastes (though we still loved Tools of Destruction, obviously), and Booty looks like it'll pull the needle back the other way. We got about 20 minutes of good, solid hop 'n bop time with the game and were pleasantly surprised.
See, Ratchet, chasing a decidedly Clank-like could-be hallucination after being shipwrecked has lost all his delightful toys, which sort of takes the game back to its roots. Armed only with his trusty Omni-Wrench and the newfound ability to fire out the tip to create an electricity tether to reel things in or deploy platforms, he sets out to help the denizens of this new land on their quest to re-power a set of five turbines. Though the actual means of doing so changes from turbine to turbine, the end goal is the same: get to the top, turn the crank and get teleported back to the ground nearby.
It's the perfect foil for all of Ratchet's classic bits of gameplay; you've got your elaborate grind rail sections, your gravity boot segments where Rachet walks vertically up the side of the turbine towers, and even just some good ol' fashioned scaling of a series of platforms, wall shimmies and so on. All of these segments made liberal use of the new wrench mechanic to pull down spring-loaded platforms, rotate others so they were flat enough for Ratchet to jump on and more. It made for some of the tightest, most pure bits of platforming we've ever played in the series, and if the rest of the experience can live up to these moments (remember, we didn't even do that much combat), then we're going to be very happy when the game drops.
Tentatively that's just "this Fall," but at least we have a few screens and movies for you to drool over in the mean time, and we have it on good authority that the game will be hitting the PlayStation Store in just a few weeks. As soon as we've been able to take the whole game through its paces, we'll report back right here. Because we love you that much.
