It's still a good game, but it's definitely pretty vanilla as far as Ratchet & Clank goes. There's little here outside of the core gameplay, which luckily is still fantastic. Lots of the new levels are cool. Many new weapons are included, but admittedly you can see the struggle to come up with truly new weapons even beyond the staples like shotguns, bombs and rapid-fire pistols.

There is a brand new upgrade system to the weapons which I love. Unfortunately the old level up system is still here, which I've stated my problems with in the past - the fact it promotes using bad weapons in wrong situations to gain exp, the fact that some weapons are infinitely harder to level up due to ammo count, or completely ignoring maxed out weapons etc. But now there's a new reason to dislike it: the inclusion of "devices" which are disposable items to help in battle. Except I never used them because it'd just be wasting weapon exp. It's such a shame the system continues to thrive so much when this game offered a completely new way to upgrade weapons that could have replaced it without making the player feel like they're missing out if they use literally anything else except a level-up-able to kill an enemy.

But that's my only major gripe. Everything else just feels like "yeah it's good, but it could have been better". Even the arena feels super watered down, with very few courses and most of them just amounting to a few rounds each while introducing no new ideas.

I will say that it's some of the most fun Clank sections I've played so far (other than maybe some of the minigames in Size Matters). The slow down mechanic really made them better than the "puzzle" versions in older games, which were less like puzzles and more like very slow "press a button to proceed and then wait for something to happen".