Spin-offs have become all the rage for two of Sony's biggest mascot-driven franchises, with Daxter filling in the details between Jak II and Jak 3 in a game that concentrated solely on the titular Ottsel. Though technically High Impact Games' first project after spinning off from Insomniac Games more or less adopted most of the action from their Ratchet & Clank roots, the PSP release of Ratchet: Size Matters at least gave them the springboard to give the lovable Clank his own game.

Well, perhaps that's a little misleading. Yes, the title of the game is Secret Agent Clank, but if the first three levels that we've played through are any indication, the game is just as much about buddy Ratchet and series tag-alongs the Gadgebots and Captain Qwark as it is about turning the meek little robot into a suave Robo-Band. Not that we're complaining, mind you, we just didn't expect the game to introduce so many different types of gameplay in such a rapid-fire succession.

Luckily, nearly all of them are a blast to play through, taking what was familiar about the past console games and Size Matters and tweaking it slightly. As the story goes, Clank is apparently something of an intergalactic super-spy, right down to missions doled out from an agency and an assortment of cool little gadgets. One night while on assignment to "secure" the universe's biggest diamond, the Eye of Infinity, ol' chrome dome happens to spot what looks like Ratchet breaking into the Boltaire Museum. Blithely ignoring the laser grid at the entrance, however, Ratchet is pinched by security and tossed in the clink, but not before rambling with a decidedly more sinister tone than the Ratchet we normally know.

We'll get to what Clanks antics involve in just a second, but perhaps it's better to follow Ratchet's side of the adventure first. Tossed in the clink with an apparently overzealous warden that's all too eager to let an entire prison of inmates that Ratchet helped lock up go crazy on him, arena-style, it's only a few new weapons lovingly baked into cakes that keeps the Lombax from becoming the main ingredient in revenge stew.

The warden has apparently arranged a slew of "tournaments" that see wave after of wave of enemies pouring into a smallish circular arena that quickly starts to plummet between rounds, stopping only to open doors and let the next wave in. In an interesting take on the arenas that appeared in other Ratchet games (including the awesome PS3 outing), the fact that the floor is nearly always screaming downward changes just how much air Ratchet gets when doing his trademark double-jump, which in turn mixed up some of the strategy in how we handled increasingly more potent waves of enemies.

The usual long-ranged candidates like the Dual Lacerators and Ratchet's trusty wrench were immediate go-to weapons, but we also were able to use a Shard Cannon (which, after we'd played through all the different challenges a few times was upgraded to allow us to charge up the shot to provide a freezing shot with more oomph at the expense of more ammo), and the Walloper (which turned normal punches into dash-smacks and after an upgrade a la that Shard Cannon, could be turned into a jump-powered slam into the ground -- made a little more tricky by the aforementioned weird gravity of the falling arena).