Quest for Value
Insomniac's newest download-only Ratchet & Clank game aims to find treasure, but is the journey worth it?
Published: August 15, 2008
I will admit that for a game that's only 3 hours long, a decent amount of that time is spent furthering the story from Tools of Destruction. Clank is still missing, abducted by the Zoni and Ratchet wants only to find him. Hearing tell of pirate called Blackwater, he heads out to a pirate ship to find him, gets shot out of a cannon and ends up on an island that fears Blackwater and his curse. Oh, and the little impromptu trip left Ratchet without any weapons. Greeaaaat.
By the end of the little adventure, you'll not only have solved a mystery or two, but built a telescope that can find Clank's location and even seen the return of a particularly awesome villain from previous Ratchet adventures. Joy!
For me, though, not seeing the game quite on the level of previous entries was an almost constant distraction. The normally brilliant animation and lip synching didn't have that pop -- in fact, the latter was done all but automatically using a middleware tool that would often take the jagged mouths of the characters in the game and warp and twist their geometry in weird ways. You'd see teeth disappear, mouths curve where they normally wouldn't, and so on. It just didn't feel as complex as previous entries -- not even the PS2 ones -- and I suspect it was just because hand-animating or tweaking things would have taken ages.
I can understand the why of it all, I just can't look past it. Not for a game with this kind of pedigree. If nothing else, the rest of the game runs quite well. The framerate is mostly solid and plenty smooth (I saw little of the tearing that was present in the last PS3 game), the actual combat animations, lifted from the previous game, are just as good now, and the platforming bits using the grav boots are still every bit as solid as they've ever been. The texture work, however, seemed just a little on the flat side. So much attention was paid with the last game to building color and texture, and that same level of pop didn't really hit this time around.
The audio, luckily, survived the process entirely unscathed. The voice work was fantastic, particularly the pirates themselves and the narration they handle during the brief little animated interludes while loading up the next section of the planet, and the actual dialogue itself was at times genuinely hilarious. David Bergeaud channels his inner Hans Zimmer (or perhaps more appropriately Claus Badelt) to come up with a sufficiently Ratchet-ized version of the Pirates of the Caribbean theme. He also ditches the Theremin and steps more into spooky/piratey themes, though as usual it's fantastic stuff. Really, the audio across the board is superb.
I just wish the rest of the game was equally uncompromised. The core of Ratchet is here, sure, but the actual delivery isn't nearly as slick as it is in the full-blown games. I applaud Insomniac for having cranked out what must be a record four games by the end of this year in only two years of the PS3 having been around. That 75% of them were just about as close as one can get to a sure thing is nothing short of remarkable, but it would seem the forumula of time + effort + love didn't quite add up to an experience that's on par with their other offerings.
Ratchet & Clank: Quest for Booty is by no means a bad game. In truth it's still probably better than 90% of the games out there thanks to some great gameplay moments and lots of humor. The difference, however, is that it's not a great Ratchet game. With zero replay value and only about three hours of actual gameplay, even 15 bucks starts to sound a little steep. It's worth checking out if you're a Ratchet superfan, and definitely get it once it slides down past the $10 mark, but $5 per hour is just a bit too much to recommend for what's there.
