Ratchet & Clank: Size Matters
Oh, it SO does. Find out just what happens when you take an immersive PS2 experience and cram it into the PSP with our hands-on impressions of both single and multiplayer.
Published: December 13, 2006
Those Insomniac Games cats are pretty damn good at what they do. It wasn't hard to scoff at the character designs for lombox Ratchet and his little robo-friend Clank when they first made their debut using the Insomniac/Naughty Dog engine-powered first outing. Within a good 30 seconds of playing the game, though, there was no denying that it was something very special indeed.
Four games later and the high honors of being the first American-developed PS2 game to be bundled in Japan, the series is still going strong, so it's not a huge surprise that Sony would want to move the franchise to the PSP. What is surprising, however, is that Insomniac isn't working on it. Make no mistake, the Insomniac touch is certainly present, made possible by the fact that folks from Burbank, CA-based development house left to form their own studio. In much the same way that Ready at Dawn Studios left Naughty Dog to work on the Daxter spin-off, High Impact Games still maintains close ties with their former co-workers and are lovingly giving Ratchet & Clank a proper PSP offering.
Unlike Daxter, however Ratchet & Clank: Size Matters is not a spin-off, it's a direct sequel to Ratchet: Deadlocked, were the duo are taking a little much-needed time off between universe-saving exploits. If the run-down sounds a little familiar, it's probably because we first covered the game a few weeks before E3 earlier this year, and were all too happy to post a lengthy preview of the single-player portion of the game. That's still good, and we actually played quite a bit more than the stuff shown off at E3, but if you want the basics, it's waiting for you in that link above.
The new stuff, though, is the multiplayer portion. Supporting proper online play with up to three other people (though we only played it via Ad-Hoc), the same sort of warped sense of humor is readily present in the two gameplay modes we tried out. The first, Iron Lombax, had us sucking up cows with the trusty Suck Cannon (modified for bovine hoovering maneuvers, mind) and then plunking them into a machine that would generate crates of meat to deliver to a nearby space burger joint. Since it's a cooperative team-based thing, you actually have to coordinate cow-scooping and even run a little interference, offing folks from the other team or just outright stealing their crates if need be.
The second mode was far more standard stuff, just your run-of-the-mill Deathmatch Mode, but it was made all the better by the fact that the R&C series rocks an awesome selection of weapons, not the least of which were the Laser Tracer (used to carve... stuff in enemy and terrain alike), the Acid Bomb Glove (a tweak of the mainstay that left pools of acid after the explosion) and the Bee Mine Glove (lob hive, get a swarm of robo-bees to annoy and damage your foes). Many of the weapons are still under wraps, but we're happy to confirm that the experience and leveling system for the weapons is firmly in place.
New to the single-player game, however, is the ability to add armor pieces. Broken down into helmets, body suits, gloves and boots, the armor adds obvious protection from damage, but if you can rock a full set of one armor type, you'll get specific bonuses like fire or ice crystals that attach to Ratchet's wrench. One of the more passive weapons in the game is the new Sprout-O-Matic, which lets you water a pit of sand and then unleash the plants that grow there to do your bidding, from breaking down walls to traversing the whole level to complete mini-puzzles.
We also got to mess around with some of the new levels in the game -- specifically the ones that focused on Clank, who got to tool around in his own vehicles and, in downright impressive show of the PSPs hardware and High Impact's skill in hiding draw distance, a lengthy (and rather difficult) 3D shooter segment. Ratchet's levels still sported the same fantastic controls and level design that didn't mind wrapping back around after you'd earned new weapons to unlock new areas. In all, the single-player stuff was just as solid and bolt-collectingly good as we'd hoped.
In fact, the whole game is turning out remarkably solid. For something that began about a year ago, some major advances have been made in wrangling not only the PSPs controls but the horsepower tucked into the hardware (oh yeah, it is the most powerful handheld ever made, how about that?), proving yet again that Sony's first- (or, well, second-) party efforts are more than up to the task of crafting games that are good enough to buy a PSP for. Fans of the series are absolutely going to eat this game up, and, we're hoping a few newcomers will find this a great way to jump in.
Four games later and the high honors of being the first American-developed PS2 game to be bundled in Japan, the series is still going strong, so it's not a huge surprise that Sony would want to move the franchise to the PSP. What is surprising, however, is that Insomniac isn't working on it. Make no mistake, the Insomniac touch is certainly present, made possible by the fact that folks from Burbank, CA-based development house left to form their own studio. In much the same way that Ready at Dawn Studios left Naughty Dog to work on the Daxter spin-off, High Impact Games still maintains close ties with their former co-workers and are lovingly giving Ratchet & Clank a proper PSP offering.
Unlike Daxter, however Ratchet & Clank: Size Matters is not a spin-off, it's a direct sequel to Ratchet: Deadlocked, were the duo are taking a little much-needed time off between universe-saving exploits. If the run-down sounds a little familiar, it's probably because we first covered the game a few weeks before E3 earlier this year, and were all too happy to post a lengthy preview of the single-player portion of the game. That's still good, and we actually played quite a bit more than the stuff shown off at E3, but if you want the basics, it's waiting for you in that link above.
The new stuff, though, is the multiplayer portion. Supporting proper online play with up to three other people (though we only played it via Ad-Hoc), the same sort of warped sense of humor is readily present in the two gameplay modes we tried out. The first, Iron Lombax, had us sucking up cows with the trusty Suck Cannon (modified for bovine hoovering maneuvers, mind) and then plunking them into a machine that would generate crates of meat to deliver to a nearby space burger joint. Since it's a cooperative team-based thing, you actually have to coordinate cow-scooping and even run a little interference, offing folks from the other team or just outright stealing their crates if need be.
The second mode was far more standard stuff, just your run-of-the-mill Deathmatch Mode, but it was made all the better by the fact that the R&C series rocks an awesome selection of weapons, not the least of which were the Laser Tracer (used to carve... stuff in enemy and terrain alike), the Acid Bomb Glove (a tweak of the mainstay that left pools of acid after the explosion) and the Bee Mine Glove (lob hive, get a swarm of robo-bees to annoy and damage your foes). Many of the weapons are still under wraps, but we're happy to confirm that the experience and leveling system for the weapons is firmly in place.
New to the single-player game, however, is the ability to add armor pieces. Broken down into helmets, body suits, gloves and boots, the armor adds obvious protection from damage, but if you can rock a full set of one armor type, you'll get specific bonuses like fire or ice crystals that attach to Ratchet's wrench. One of the more passive weapons in the game is the new Sprout-O-Matic, which lets you water a pit of sand and then unleash the plants that grow there to do your bidding, from breaking down walls to traversing the whole level to complete mini-puzzles.
We also got to mess around with some of the new levels in the game -- specifically the ones that focused on Clank, who got to tool around in his own vehicles and, in downright impressive show of the PSPs hardware and High Impact's skill in hiding draw distance, a lengthy (and rather difficult) 3D shooter segment. Ratchet's levels still sported the same fantastic controls and level design that didn't mind wrapping back around after you'd earned new weapons to unlock new areas. In all, the single-player stuff was just as solid and bolt-collectingly good as we'd hoped.
In fact, the whole game is turning out remarkably solid. For something that began about a year ago, some major advances have been made in wrangling not only the PSPs controls but the horsepower tucked into the hardware (oh yeah, it is the most powerful handheld ever made, how about that?), proving yet again that Sony's first- (or, well, second-) party efforts are more than up to the task of crafting games that are good enough to buy a PSP for. Fans of the series are absolutely going to eat this game up, and, we're hoping a few newcomers will find this a great way to jump in.
