In all, it was a familiar re-introduction to things like using the d-pad to strafe and the shoulder buttons to rotate the camera, though we will admit that things seemed a little too recycled at this point. Luckily, we were playing an early preview build that was already quite a bit more polished than what we'd briefly peeked at during the Game Developers Conference earlier this year. The newer build, while experiencing a couple of audio/video sync issues, already had things like background music during cutscenes in place, which helped quite a bit.

One such bit of lip synching wonkiness came as we were exploring the more fleshed-out Gadgebot sections. Clank's adorable little radio-controlled pals aren't new to the series, but some of their abilities were. Now, they could stack atop one another, and while switching between the little identical robo-buddies was as simple as tapping a button, it was the familiar mechanic of issuing orders to the rest of the group that made things more interesting. For starters, attacking automatically sends out a pulse that tells the other Gadgebots to do the same, making combat relatively easy despite the little guys' lack of overwhelming power. Another one-button press will cause them all to stack up, but in classic Ratchet fashion, it's about taking control of one of the little guys, placing him and then giving the order to wait so you can position the others.

Things like pressure pads will be immediately familiar to long-time vets of the series, and even the mechanic of using Tesla Coil-like jets of electricity to help power dead terminals teased with bits of déjà vu, but one cute little new development is an almost hamster wheel-like system for running in place to raise or lower platforms. While the early Gadgebot missions were more or less just keeping the guys together and triggering pressure plates, the later ones we tried actually had us splitting the group up a few times and using every option in their repertoire to accomplish goals on different parts of the map. Their efforts in turn helped us rescue Clank from a decidedly Doctor No-esque laser beam trap. (Clank even utters the classic line, "do you expect me to talk?") But we'll get to Clank, again, in a second.

Up until we'd experienced it, the series' classic mix of action and humor had leaned rather heavily toward the former, but classic comic relief foil Captain Qwark luckily helped tip things back toward the middle as we fought a massive mechanized dragon culled from the rather... "creative" imagination of one of the galaxy's biggest (former) heroes. See, Qwark is apparently having all his exploits recorded by a biographer, but in a fun little twist, we were the ones that actually played out his rather, shall we say, tall tale.

God, yes, that's a horrible, horrible pun considering the lone bit of gameplay with Qwark had him recounting a tale that sounded an awful lot like what happened when Clank turned into Giant Clank -- and only became more ridiculous as it went on. See, the battle started off simply enough, with a big tussle between Giant Qwark and the robo-dragon in a spherical world littered with futuristic buildings and plenty of neon. Unfortunately, that wasn't quite "heroic" enough for Qwark, so he began revising the details of the story -- as we were playing it. Suddenly, there were ninjas. Then they were bigger! Then they shot fireballs or something! Each change to the story changed the boss fight, and it was actually quite a bit of fun to finally bring the bad guy down by first punching ninjas into towers pouring energy into the dragon, then unleashing a massive blast from our ray gun.