These days games are all about insane graphics, intuitive gameplay and big budgets. Gone are the days of Crash Bandicoot, Spyro the Dragon and Sonic the Hedgehog. What ever happened to having fun?! Well, Ratchet & Clank: Into the Nexus aims to bring the fun back to your PS3, giving you an experience only a platformer could!
Whilst escorting Vendra and Neftin Prog to the Vartax Detention Center, Ratchet & Clank run in to big trouble when they are ambushed, with the twin criminals making their escape and our heroins left stranded in space. Eventually the two land on Planet Yerek and instead of making their way home they make it their mission to find the deadly twins and restore justice.
With all new weapons and gameplay mechanics, there is a lot of fun to be had in this game. There is nothing revolutionary, but it’s not that type of game. There is so much fun to be had playing around, beating bad guys and upgrading your weapons.
The game sticks to its roots with a traditional button set, but some of the weapons are so much fun to play with. In the preview build the usual starter weapons were all available, but there was the amazing weapon I couldn’t stop using. The Nightmare Box. A weapon that fire grenades in to the ground which explode in to vicious, nightmare robots! Tactically, they aren’t the strongest, but use them right and they can hold off enemies while you swap weapons or melee attack them.
Another gameplay feature I really liked came in the form of magnetic boots that allow Ratchet to jump through space onto special platforms. This was on full display in the time I spent with the game, almost like the game wanted me to be fully aware of the fun that could be had with them. There’s also the Grav Tether, a tool that joins two nodes to create a warp tunnel Ratchet & Clank can use to travel in to higher spots. There are some really clever uses for this gadget, but I won’t spoil them all here now. There needs to be some mystery left over for the full game, right?
In terms of visuals, the game looks goo during gameplay, however the cut scenes are quite a sight. The lighting is pretty much perfect and you can really get sucked in to scenes even though the look is far from super realistic. Character models remains just as impressive as previous titles in the series, there are no dramatic changes. Same can be said for the sound too. The best thing I can say about it is that you don’t think about it or notice it too much, which means it must doing something right.
The gaming world is full of bombastic first-person shooters and real world simulators, so much so that a title like Ratchet & Clank: Into the Nexus is a more than welcome change of pace. It looks set to continue the series’ fun traditions, hopefully sending off the platform genre with a nice little send off as we move into the next generation of consoles.
