Ratchet & Clank Future: Quest For Booty is a quick but engaging little sidegame for the series. I saw it on PS Now many times but never got around to playing it because I always thought it was a full game, but once I learned that it was actually only a few hours long I figured it would be the perfect game to beat in one sitting and feel like I was actually making progress with something while im sitting here sick as hell. And well, there really isnt much to say about it. Its not different from the other Ratchet games I played. Thats to say it doesnt do anything new but its still a really fun time. The story isnt really there but its funny and entertaining. Theres a few annoying parts and bad checkpoints but theres not much to complain about either. Its just a short little fun time that you probably wont remember much of and sometimes thats just what you need.

Time Played - 5 hours 9 minutes
Nancymeter - 75/100
Game Completion #52 of 2022
May Completion #2

Quest for Booty is an inoffensive trip with some neat ideas, but utlimately lacks the impact of its siblings.

There are no new weapons; they're all taken from Tools of Destruction (yet the player's full arsenal isn’t present). Item-grabbing and the wrench tether seem like original mechanics at first, but they're both used later in A Crack in Time (CiT)

Major fights from Tools of Destruction (ToD) are also reused: Destroying a slew of pirate ship cannons was a particularly memorable moment in ToD, so having it implemented in a less challenging way feels cheap. It’s also disappointing that the player does this fight on a turret, as shooting shit with a turret is perhaps the series’ least engaging gimmick. The large mechanical pirate bosses also make a return, and since they were already overused in ToD, having to fight even more of them was tiring. Additionally, many battles are treated as "waves." Essentially, the player sits in one spot and fights tons of enemies as they spawn on top of them. R&C usually has the player progressing through areas and fighting enemies that are naturally placed; I assume this new system was implemented to pad the game's length.

Quest for Booty suffers from a severe re-use of assets in general. The game begins and ends around a collection of pirate ships (from ToD of course) that are sailing across a terribly animated sea with a few shittily modeled rocks placed to create the illusion of motion. The pirate enemies are also reused from ToD.

Quest for Booty being a direct sequel to ToD cheapens the game’s ending. ToD ended on a significant cliffhanger, and at the time, it was the most story-driven game in the series. To have it continue with mediocre filler is mind-boggling. I wouldn’t mind if it were a spin-off, but the events of this game are unfortunately necessary to bridge the gap between ToD and CiT.

I also have mixed feelings on how long it takes for the action to begin. Quest for Booty’s first and second levels are exclusively platforming puzzles (not including the introduction). This is a cool idea conceptually, but many of these puzzles felt a bit too simple to be engaging. Some of the windmill puzzles are clever though, like when you grind across a rail and have to quickly pick up a bomb to toss at a weakened gate. And avoiding ravenous winged creatures while cautiously traversing narrow platforms in a dark cavern is Quest for Booty’s most inspired quality.

Thankfully, the final boss is mechanically exciting. Jumping between pirate ships throughout a multi-phased fight is a fun idea; however, like I stated earlier, the environment itself isn’t original. I would have enjoyed it more if the player’s full arsenal from ToD was available and Insomniac treated the fight itself as a super-boss. I was playing Quest for Booty on Hard, yet the base game for ToD featured a far more challenging final boss.

Even after all the issues I have with this game, Quest for Booty features ToD’s excellent mechanical foundation. This instantly makes parts of it fun, regardless of how unoriginal half of the content is.

I'm a little confused about why this exists. It's essentially an expansion for TOOLS OF DESTRUCTION that's about a quarter as long, has -literally zero- new weapons (and about a quarter of the previous game's total arsenal), has no secrets, unlockables, or any kind of optional content, and since Clank isn't in it (for story reasons) Ratchet only has about half of his normal moves. There isn't even any shooting combat for close to half of the game, and all of the sudden, the focus is squarely on platforming and puzzle solving. It honestly plays like some kind of Ratchet UNCHARTED, and wow, that is not what I'm looking for from these games! Is this what CRACK IN TIME is like?! Yikes.

Definitely regret spending $15 on this. Three hours of the instantly-tiresome pirate crap from TOOLS with close to no new assets and zero replayability. Baffling.

Quest for Booty is... odd. It's definitely DLC-sized, but it's different in some small ways from Tools for Destruction to justify it not being a DLC, but then it's too short to justify it being a standalone game.

More to the point, it's nowhere near good enough to justify it being the middle entry of the Future trilogy, and it seems as though it was made in the middle of A Crack in Time's development just so that the Future games could be a trilogy.

I don't mean to rant, but, like I said, Quest for Booty is just odd. My issue isn't so much that it's short, as I've played and loved many games that were as short or even shorter, but the swashbuckling adventure it depicts isn't quite exciting enough to justify being its own game and could have easily been covered in an intermediary comic series that bridges the gap between Tools of Destruction and A Crack in Time.

In a sense, it's pretty much just an epilogue to Tools of Destruction instead of a narrative with its own individual merits.

The story is... there? It's not quite the pirate adventure it promises, but it's not exactly bad either. Not very much happens to further the characters or even provide interesting plot points that lead into A Crack in Time, apart from the end reveal just before the credits.

Some of the platforming on the main island, particularly involving repairing the wind turbines, is fun, as are the puzzles in Darkwater Cove, but other than that, and not to sound like a cliche, Quest for Booty is certainly one of the Ratchet & Clank games of all time. Not bad enough to be bad, not good enough to be good.

5/10

Forever salty by how the Ratchet and Clank game that reenacts the plot of Treasure Planet and gives you oodles of goofy, silly pirate content is also the shortest one at only a 2-3 hour runtime. I understand this was meant to be mildly overpriced DLC to tide players over before the release of ACIT but that trap-ridden pirate's cave filled with pilfered booty and dead man tell no tales should've been twice as long.

At least Insomniac understood the value of a good pirate in the ol' character roster and made both Slag and Rusty Pete reoccurring characters starting with this game. I'm glad that Slag inexplicably comes back from the dead and later hosts a radio station in ACIT.

This game actually goes pretty hard for a side-game meant to tide players over until A Crack in Time, and I think the short length works in its favour as I find most of the other Ratchet & Clank games begin to lose steam in the endgame. However, I can totally understand players back in 2008 feeling that it was an overpriced DLC for Tools of Destruction.

The space pirates are my favourite recurring enemies in the series, and I love pirate themes in general, so of course I was delighted to have a game all about them. It's a fun ride and doesn't overstay its welcome. But it may have been better off actually being DLC, and if it was released in the current gaming landscape it probably would be.

Some of them will find this game exciting, and some of them not. This game its not a major game, but more of an extension of the Ratchet & Clank: Tools of Destruction. What I want to say is that you can finish this game in just few hours, 4-5 if you are new to the game. For this reason it doesn't put a great impact and the gameplay isn't so groundbreaking, which led me playing this game several times ( I think 6 or 7 times till now). All in all I recommend this for the fans of R&C, but for others, better not.

If I could describe this game in one word it would be underwhelming. It is over as soon as it begins. The story is unnecessary and should have just been dlc for ToD. The pirate plot dragging on to long was one of my very few lowlights of ToD and this just drug it even further. There was only 7 weapons and non of them are new. The only Ratchet game I’ve played so far that this may have been more fun gameplay wise was Secret Agent Clank. The writing was decent, and there were a few laughs but it wasn’t enough to save this from the lower end of mediocrity. It does however have the best game title in the series so there’s that. Very excited to begin Crack in Time.

This is possibly the most pointless game I've ever played, in the sense I don't understand why it was a unique SKU. This is a (lame) level or two of a regular Ratchet and Clank game. It could have easily been DLC for the first Ratchet and Clank Future game, since it was only released digitally in its home country anyway. It could have been the beginning of the next Future game. It could have been an email.

Quest for Booty feels like such a tech demo I feel like I'm rating a 8th grader's rough draft of an essay they plagiarized from themselves. Like, I can't give you a failing grade, because you technically did your homework, and I was able to comprehend it. But robot pirates have souls? But their robot brains can be brought back to life without souls? But their souls can animate heads without their brains? What are you DOING, and is it a regulated substance?

Special shout-out to the woman on the front cover who I will never learn the name of due to her nothing contribution to both this game and the previous one, who even the game hates to the point another named character refers to her as "Ratchet's female"??? Like, they call Ratchet by his species when they're being disrespectful. But she's just species: female. But Ratchet's female. She doesn't even get to be her own female. Even though she's not a lombax! Did the people MAKING this game know her name? Does she have a name???

Where the fuck is Angela?????

Even though it basically reuses all of Tools of Destructions assets, in a very limited format, it still has a few unique mechanics to it. For one thing the wrench now has an actual use outside of battle other than turning cranks.

It focuses a lot more on platforming - probably the most since the original games, which I guess was them making use of the fact there's no Clank, and thus half your "easy" movement options are gone.

It does ultimately feel a little pointless though. I played it on PS Now so I dunno the release history of this game, but it feels like it should have been a prologue to the next game rather than a standalone thing between releases that you have to pay for. It's not bad but it's just such a limited version of R&C to spend your time (and money depending on how you get it) on.