Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart looks like a Pixar movie and plays like a charm

Hey, listen; it’s the middle of summer, my apartment is boiling, I don’t want to be stuck inside writing this review. I’m going to assume you don’t want to be stuck inside reading it either, so I’ll cut right to the chase: Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart is great.

I’ve been a Ratchet fan since the original games back in the PlayStation 2 era and there hasn’t been a single instalment in the series that I haven’t enjoyed. This latest one is no exception. It’s everything you want from a Ratchet game, and it looks like a fucking Pixar movie.

Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart is exactly what you would expect from a PlayStation 5 exclusive Ratchet game. The basic formula hasn’t changed much since the PS2 days: you (Ratchet) run around with a robot (like Clank) strapped to your back, you unload your arsenal of weird guns on an army of enemies, and you do some basic platforming and puzzling.

It was fun twenty years ago and it’s still fun today. It just looks and plays even better on PlayStation 5.

That’s not to say that the series hasn’t evolved, au contraire. There’s more variety in the gameplay (you get some rad new gadgets to traverse the environments with), there are some great new characters (like Rivet, a playable lady Lombax), and it has interdimensional travel as the main new gimmick.

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Actually, gimmick isn’t the right word. It’s the main new feature and it’s the reason you shouldn’t hold your breath for a PlayStation 4 port of this game.

See, Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart is built from the ground up for the PlayStation 5. More specifically, it’s developed with the console’s blazing fast SSD drive in mind. The PlayStation 5 can load up whole worlds with virtually no loading times, so in Rift Apart you can hop through interdimensional rifts to instantly travel from one world to another.

This tech is used throughout the game and it makes the whole thing feel like something you haven’t played before. Sometimes you use those rifts to zip around combat arenas, other times you’ll have to jump through portals to solve puzzles through different dimensions, and sometimes you’ll fly through a bunch of completely different-looking worlds in split seconds. It really makes the whole game feel ‘next-gen’.

It’s not just the PlayStation 5’s hard drive that developer Insomniac Games uses to great effect, the new features on the PlayStation 5 controller are wonderfully implemented too. Most guns use the adaptive triggers in inventive ways (aim a grenade by pulling the trigger halfway, pull it all the way to fire) and the improved force feedback motors on the controller are used to impressively as well.

I can keep rambling about Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart but the conclusion is pretty simple: if you’re among the lucky few who own a PlayStation 5 and you like action adventure games you’ll like this one. If you ever liked one of the previous Ratchet titles, you’ll love this one. If you don’t like these games then I don’t know what to tell you. Why are you even reading this?

Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart releases this Friday. Hope you have a good fan.