Collecting My Thought on Ratchet and Clank (2016)—I'm Playing a Movie, Right?

Never did I play any of the Ratchet and Clank games before this one. It seems I have missed out on a little fun! Released the same year as Song of the Deep, which I reviewed a few years back, it is even more of a step up from Insomniac Games' Spyro series than the standalone maritime spelunker. No wonder the studio has produced over 10 games featuring the space ranger duo since 2002, back when Spyro was put on the company shelf to make way for the birth of the original Ratchet and Clank.

This 2016 version was developed and released alongside a movie of the same name and was meant as a remake of the original 2002 version. We are introduced again to Ratchet, but this time through the narration of the hubris-prone Captain Qwark, who used to be the esteemed commander of the Galactic Rangers but is now a prison inmate. Ratchet, a feline-like creature known as a Lombax, dreamt of joining the Galactic Rangers. After facing rejection from a pre-convict Qwark, Ratchet encountered Clank, a defective robot who had crash-landed on Ratchet's planet after barely escaping a grim fate on his own. Together, the pair embark on an adventure to stop an army of evil aliens and robots using quirky guns and gadgets, capturing the attention of both the Galactic Rangers and the rascal behind the evil army, Alonzo Drek.

This adventure is filled with colour-bursting fun, satisfying explosions and a couple of good laughs here and there. Games don't often do comedy right, but Insomniac showed they have the capability to do so. They found a good combination of the original game, the movie and new enhancements to develop this decent, lively reboot. In fact, without having known about the movie yet, at the start of the game I noted how much it felt like I was playing inside an animated film. It was the graphics, the score, the voicework and the animations that came together so specifically to invoke that feeling, and it's a feeling that I don't think I've had from any game previously. It's very good to see that Insomniac had come leaps and bounds in the quality of their work's production over the decades, and I have little doubt they would have continued this trend coming into the 2020's.

#FashionablyLateBy Seven years for the reboot; thrice as long for the original.

#LearntANewWord Sprocket.

#FavouriteBoss Mrs. Zurkon.

#FavouriteMechanic Gravity boots. You get such nice views walking with it. Honourable mention goes to the Pixeliser for being the most fun and sonically pleasing shotgun I've ever fired.