Video game review - The Ratchet and Clank Trilogy; AKA Every Bolt Has A Silver Lining

Image: Jamie Breeze

Jamie Breeze, yet again, tries to fault a consumer item by taking the piss out of things that are pretty much flawless. This time, The Ratchet and Clank Trilogy on PS3.

For those who aren’t aware of the Ratchet and Clank series, in a nutshell, it’s a complete rip-off of Jak and Daxter, which sparked a spiritual sequel named Starsky and Hutch.

Actually, it’s a series of games that revolve around a space-cat and his mate that he picked up cheap from Argos, who serves primarily as a chunky paperweight or a makeshift book holder. The protagonist is a crazy kleptomaniac with no sense of decency or dignity as he casually turns things into ducks and sheep, walks up walls, and smashes roadside lamps for money. The deuteragonist is a greasy, arse-licking oil dweller who commands lines of miniature robots to do his job for him when his partner isn’t around to give him bugger all to do, anyway. These people are in charge of a fictitious universe. What next, rivals making cameos in their games just to make a quick penny? Oh.

Well, that’s rich. Insomniac Games are rich. Idol Minds are rich. They’re bloody loaded. They’ve only gone and sold you games that you’ve already played before. They’ve added little quirks too, so you’re not going to question all the piss-poor effort they made in porting the games to PS3 in the first place. And there are trophies. To cut a long story short, it’s the carrot on the end of nostalgia on the end of a stick, which in turn sounds like a failed Jeff Dunham puppet.

Is it that harsh? Of course not, you silly prick. Since Ratchet and Clank is one of the more satisfying bugger-em-ups in the gaming universe, you can’t put it down as a cheap attempt for much more moolah. You can, actually, because you’re entitled to your own opinion, but you’d be wrong. Yes, I know opinions cannot be considered invalid since they’re opinions, but when people invented the laws of English and shit like that, they knew odd occurrences like this would happen. It goes without saying that if you dislike Ratchet and Clank, you probably liked United Kingdom’s entry for any given Eurovision event. Harsh, but true. Harsh like the carrot thing.

The graphics, as one would expect, are sharp, dressed and manly like the man from ZZ Top’s song Sharp Dressed Man. Randomly placed wooden box after randomly placed wooden box of HD gloriousness, the collection promises no less than your own tears as you blind yourself, nonchalantly gallivanting the baddie-ridden streets of planets with even stupider names than those of the elder dragons from the original Spyro game. In fact, the names are probably interchangeable with most inconspicuousness. Well done, Insomniac Games. Well bloody done.

Image: Jamie Breeze

The thought kicks around in my head, blergh. I apologise if you were expecting Tangents-R-Us, but I’m going to rant on about things anyway. What’s up with bolt currency? I can barely collect the sense from the surface of pointlessness from having such a rubbish currency in the Spyro games. I mean, gems, honestly, what. But bolts? They shine like Louie Spence wearing oiled-up mirrors in a car wash, but so does a bucket of faeces if you scrub it hard enough. There you go, though, you’re using metal connector pins as money. Think entity, think entropy, not shiny.

If glossy metal isn’t entirely your cup of oil, then you may be chuffed with the other 99.56% of the game which includes shooting, jumping, sarcasm, and leprosy… which, funnily enough, is similar to the process of writing reviews like these. Everything in the games, from the dialogue to the weapon upgrades, massively favours the series’ replay value. The most notorious loaner to the game’s “I’ll definitely play this [x] amount of times before I die” value is the in-game achievements system known (and borrowed from Spyro) as “skill points”. Silly tasks such as farting three times while in the ship, guessing the amount of bolts in a box before you break it, or defeating the final boss only using your nipple hair, will net you these “skill points” and unlock cheats throughout the game.

The cheats aren’t really cheats, though. They’re more like diluted cheats, such as donning a tux on Ratchet or reversing the level horizontally, which provide no gaming leeway whatsoever, unless you do well in the presence of tuxedos, or comply more sufficiently when disoriented. While another watered-down cheat may increase the size of the craniums of all enemies, with this series’ pioneer status in meta-gaming it’s fair to say that the developers of this magical franchise are the ones with the biggest heads.

With all this in mind, the Ratchet and Clank Trilogy packs a massive fully-upgraded-walloper-punch, as you do all but platforming while you’re racing in old faux-WipEout hover cars, drilling bullets into old faux-Star Wars fighting ships, and solving puzzles in faux-Crystal Maze environments, which would make Ian Anderson, George Lucas, and Richard O’Brien turn in their bastard graves, if only I had the opportunity to cease them. There are no faults here. Ratchet games are the sole reason to exist on this earth, and by reading this you are only making me angrier. Go and buy this bloody game, for Christ’s sake, right now.

Master of knives, bells, and whistles, Jamie is cranially unoccupied. A sarcastic knob, his trickery of the tradery usually floats around video games and music like lonely cirrus cloud above the sea of Okhotsk. Any money missing from your wallet is purely personalised wage. Why not follow him on Twitter? You may as well.

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Below: The Ratchet and Clank Trilogy announcement trailer