Ratchet & Clank 3

A long time ago I played most of Ratchet & Clank 1, but for some unknown reason (or at least I don’t remember the reason) I never got around completing it, but I remember clearly that I liked it very much. So I picked up Ratchet & Clank 3 the other day almost for free the local videogames pusher.

Boy is that game great or what… I know I say this a lot, but this game is one of the funniest and most accessible games I’ve played for a long time. Guitar Hero might top it for “coolness-factor”, but this game really deserves some praise. At least it deserves to be recognized for one of the best platform games ever made.

It’s already an old game (released in 2004 – and that being one of the reasons for it being super cheap) but in my book it stands and one of the best games made for the PS2 platform.

Again you follow the main characters the lombat Ratchet and his robot companion Clank around the galaxy in order to save the day. The evil Dr. Nefarious is planning some very evil schemes and must be stopped before it?s too late. Captain Quark is missing-in-action and is presume dead.

The story follows a used path that sound familiar to most, but the presentation of it is top-notch. I for one could stop thinking about how Futurama influenced this.

You are given missions that must be completed in certain order to advance in the game, same same. But around one third through the game it starts splitting the missions in a more random order. It uses hub-structure instead and it works really well. You get around revisiting some of the same places more than once, but the challenges presented are almost always different.

I for one hate (as in H-A-T-E) backtracking. If a game uses backtracking it for me shows that the game designers ran out of ideas and had to reuse the same locations / world over and over again. But because of the hub-structure it works very well in R&C3. Another reason why this works is, I believe also due largely to the weapons and gadgets of the game that upgrade and gain new abilities the more you use them. Common for all of them are that they are over-the-top ridiculous, hence using them is really fun.

It’s been a long time since I’ve played a game that makes so much fun a everything, include itself, and remains fun even after hours of play. I cannot recommend this game highly enough, and at the very low budget price there absolutely no going wrong with this game.