Retains all the smooth, fun Ratchet & Clank battle gameplay and brings it into the full focus. In fact these first 4 R&C games are kinda like slowly changing from exploration-based to pure combat-based. The story is still dumb fun, with a very cartoony style and tone to an otherwise serious plotline.

The concept does feel heavily underutilised though. A perfect excuse to try out many different gimmicks, gameplay styles or other fun mechanics. Instead most missions boil down to "move through the area and/or kill the enemies". It's basically like taking snippets of real R&C levels and making them "missions".

I'm kinda indifferent on the robot helpers, but I do wish they had more feedback for when you gave them a command. Like sometimes if I told them to hack an orb, they'd continue hacking all the other orbs in the area without me needing to do anything else, but other times the game would need me to individually press the command for every one. It was generally kinda hard to tell what they were doing at any one time when I was in the middle of combat.

They didn't even really try anything new with the weapons. Not only is there a pretty small roster, but most of them just take weapons from past games. And only really the simple ones, like the shotgun-type weapon, the uzi-type weapons, the bazooka-type weapon etc.

Like it's fine and it's still fun, I just think a game with a premises like "Ratchet goes through gladiator style gauntlets" should have done more with it.