When you’ve achieved perfection it’s tough to consistently perform at that level. Don’t tell that to the boys at Insomniac though, they’ve already taken the world by storm two times and they’re prone to do it for a third time with the release of
Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal, the pinnacle of third person destruction adventure gaming.
Ratchet & Clank tells the story of a loveable young mechanic and his wisecracking sidekick. It’s the standard formula for a buddy flick but the developers do so much with the characters so that they don’t fall into the one dimensional category. It’s as if each character has a life of its own and thus a real purpose that you can get behind. For two installments Ratchet has done the bulk of the work only to watch Clank gain the admiration of the galaxy. Everyone sees Clank as a Secret Agent while Ratchet is often seen as his chauffeur. In this installment Ratchet’s as pissed as he’s ever been; luckily a new foe is stirring up trouble in the galaxy, serving as the perfect outlet for his rage.
Not one to be satisfied with something crazy like universal peace, the evil Dr. Nefarious is hell bent on ridding the galaxy of squishes. It’d be great if Squishes were vermin except in this case they’re all living and breathing things. To accomplish his goal he has enlisted an especially inane group of morons to do his bidding. What they don’t realize is that they are pawns in his scheme and that he plans to destroy them after they’ve followed through with his plans. Sadly enough, it turns out that the heroes’ only hope of stopping the evil Dr. revolves around Captain Quark, the fixture from the first game. There’s a problem though, something has messed with his head and he now behaves like a giant ape. Some old characters make a return appearance but for the most part the adventure is filled with new and interesting faces who inject more life into the series.
Up Your Arsenal provides the biggest explosions in the franchise to-date. Objects don’t simply blow up and dissipate into the environment. They disintegrate at the seams and rain down chaos and destruction upon the landscape. There’s a real sense of satisfaction that accompanies the destruction you leave in your wake. It’s not like you just blow something up and move up, you get this real sense that you’re a destructive force that needs to be reckoned with. While the game is rated T for Teen it’s done so only because of the implications of perceived violence, not the actual violence produced in the game. Humans are never harmed and there are no bloodied limbs to speak of. For the most part you’ll be destroying robots and although the action teeters on excessive, it never even touches the idea of indecency. This makes the game perfect for children and an excellent choice for kids who have passed the point of Saturday morning cartoons and are on the brink of adolescence. For this we say that the game is available for players of all ages as children and adults will find something to love in this title.
What really sets this franchise apart from the others is the insane arsenal that the designers have created. Perhaps the biggest appeal of the franchise revolves around its weapons and this third entry delivers the goods. From the onset of the game you can tell that the game is serious about handing you some ferocious firepower. About five minutes into the game you’re given a shotgun and a grenade launcher to work with, the weapons just keep getting better from there. As was the case in Ratchet 2, weapons can level up through extensive amounts of use which will provide you with even more devastating firepower. A new addition allows you to test each one of the game’s weapons in a VR simulator before you buy them. In the past it was a crapshoot as you only had the weapon descriptions to go off of. Here you can actually try out the weapons in a practical setting before wasting your hard-earned wickets. One of the new pickups is the inferno mode which seems to be a take on the
Jak’s Dark Eco aspect. When activated Ratchet can take more physical damage while dealing more damage with his wrench.
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