I played Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart largely to see what the PS5 is capable of visually, and it very much delivered in this regard. The game is gorgeous, at times stunningly so, and is very adept at showing this off via its worldbuilding, various different visual tricks, and a host of exciting, inventive set-pieces. The opening shot as I landed on Blizar Prime was actually just breathtaking, and there are plenty of moments like this throughout; whilst I do have a lot of complaints with the game as a whole I can't deny that I got what I came here for.
A big problem is that for all its flashiness, Rift Apart also feels weirdly cheap in some ways too. Most notably the game was intensely buggy for me; during my playthrough I hit kill planes on level architecture that should have been traversable a handful of times (including dying from touching the edge of a platform you're literally required to jump on), was stuck in the falling animation on top of other characters a few times also (the game only knows how to terminate this by eventually realising what's happening and killing you, though in one instance it just had no idea and I was stuck there falling in place for a couple minutes), clipped through things multiple times (including getting stuck inside another character), had dialog accidentally start repeating in scenarios where it no longer made any sense. And look, I get, QA is really hard and some things are going to slip through, but wow was I left wishing some of the money that had gone into making the game look gorgeous had instead gone into making sure it wasn't constantly breaking its sense of immersion like this.
Beyond all of this, the game was a solid enough experience. The gunplay is good fun with a lot of varied and sweet weapon designs, and though I think the game both overuses the same small handful of enemy designs and leans a bit too hard on "clear every enemy in this room before you can proceed" being the most common progression gate, the frantic chaos of it all is very appealing and remained engaging throughout. The other game modes, notably Clank's possibilities puzzles and Glitch's hacking sections, landed less well for me, both having some cool ideas, but neither being given the space to breathe or develop properly. It's like you spend the whole game being tutorialised in bite-sized chunks on how to play these alternate modes, and then after all of this you're given maybe one good level for each before the game ends.
Overall the experience was enjoyable enough, I very much got what I came here for, and I devoured it over the course of a week, but there were enough problems present that it made it a hard game to really love. Beyond this the experience very much made it clear that there's a whole lot more to games than just looking pretty and that making aesthetics priority number one is a dangerous road to go down.
A big problem is that for all its flashiness, Rift Apart also feels weirdly cheap in some ways too. Most notably the game was intensely buggy for me; during my playthrough I hit kill planes on level architecture that should have been traversable a handful of times (including dying from touching the edge of a platform you're literally required to jump on), was stuck in the falling animation on top of other characters a few times also (the game only knows how to terminate this by eventually realising what's happening and killing you, though in one instance it just had no idea and I was stuck there falling in place for a couple minutes), clipped through things multiple times (including getting stuck inside another character), had dialog accidentally start repeating in scenarios where it no longer made any sense. And look, I get, QA is really hard and some things are going to slip through, but wow was I left wishing some of the money that had gone into making the game look gorgeous had instead gone into making sure it wasn't constantly breaking its sense of immersion like this.
Beyond all of this, the game was a solid enough experience. The gunplay is good fun with a lot of varied and sweet weapon designs, and though I think the game both overuses the same small handful of enemy designs and leans a bit too hard on "clear every enemy in this room before you can proceed" being the most common progression gate, the frantic chaos of it all is very appealing and remained engaging throughout. The other game modes, notably Clank's possibilities puzzles and Glitch's hacking sections, landed less well for me, both having some cool ideas, but neither being given the space to breathe or develop properly. It's like you spend the whole game being tutorialised in bite-sized chunks on how to play these alternate modes, and then after all of this you're given maybe one good level for each before the game ends.
Overall the experience was enjoyable enough, I very much got what I came here for, and I devoured it over the course of a week, but there were enough problems present that it made it a hard game to really love. Beyond this the experience very much made it clear that there's a whole lot more to games than just looking pretty and that making aesthetics priority number one is a dangerous road to go down.