This review contains spoilers
The game feels larger than any before it, both in story and in the worlds themselves. Unfortunately this is compensated by having far less planets than previous games, with a bunch of moons thrown in for filler. The best of these moons provide platforming challenges, the rest provide just simple "kill X enemies" or busy work like towing something somewhere.
The game does have probably the best Clank sections so far, with a little bit of combat, and fun time puzzles thrown in. Albeit this at the cost of them being much more prominent and taking you away from the fast paced Ratchet gameplay even more.
The game also took away the great weapon customisation from the last game for some reason?? And replaced it with some weapon modding, which sounds great in theory...but it's limited to 3 weapons lol. And the 3 most boring weapons at that. Such a weird choice.
The arena is pretty good, definitely a huge step up from ToD's. While there's a lot of your typical stuff - kill enemy waves, rotating weapons, timed fights, fighting bosses etc, there's a few unique ones such as killing enemies with their own bombs, or preventing enemies from reaching the goal posts for 2 minutes (though that last one did appear in Deadlocked which was kinda like a game for arena challenges).
I was pretty happy with how they substituted Clank with the hoverboots. I thought they might have gone through the whole game with bare Ratchet gameplay, like QfB.
The game does do a lot of great things, but when you're the 8th(?) game in a series of very similar games, it's hard not to realise what has been sacrificed to make the story larger. It's the second main game in a row without a racing minigame. Even the bloody PSP game had one. Heck even the bonus skins start to feel less and less interesting (though these are far better than ToD's). There's like...5 of them to unlock, and you can only unlock them in the order the game wants you to.
I will say this one probably had the best soundtrack thanks to the ships radio music.
So in short, I think this is the best R&C game for its core gameplay (up to this point, haven't played the PS5 one yet), and has the most ambitious story, which helps flesh worlds out a lot (each world has its own unique race of interesting characters). Buuuut it's also probably the 2nd worst in terms of giving the player variety in gameplay and generally trying new things.
The game does have probably the best Clank sections so far, with a little bit of combat, and fun time puzzles thrown in. Albeit this at the cost of them being much more prominent and taking you away from the fast paced Ratchet gameplay even more.
The game also took away the great weapon customisation from the last game for some reason?? And replaced it with some weapon modding, which sounds great in theory...but it's limited to 3 weapons lol. And the 3 most boring weapons at that. Such a weird choice.
The arena is pretty good, definitely a huge step up from ToD's. While there's a lot of your typical stuff - kill enemy waves, rotating weapons, timed fights, fighting bosses etc, there's a few unique ones such as killing enemies with their own bombs, or preventing enemies from reaching the goal posts for 2 minutes (though that last one did appear in Deadlocked which was kinda like a game for arena challenges).
I was pretty happy with how they substituted Clank with the hoverboots. I thought they might have gone through the whole game with bare Ratchet gameplay, like QfB.
The game does do a lot of great things, but when you're the 8th(?) game in a series of very similar games, it's hard not to realise what has been sacrificed to make the story larger. It's the second main game in a row without a racing minigame. Even the bloody PSP game had one. Heck even the bonus skins start to feel less and less interesting (though these are far better than ToD's). There's like...5 of them to unlock, and you can only unlock them in the order the game wants you to.
I will say this one probably had the best soundtrack thanks to the ships radio music.
So in short, I think this is the best R&C game for its core gameplay (up to this point, haven't played the PS5 one yet), and has the most ambitious story, which helps flesh worlds out a lot (each world has its own unique race of interesting characters). Buuuut it's also probably the 2nd worst in terms of giving the player variety in gameplay and generally trying new things.