It's an alright game overall, though I will admit it's a bit of a guilty pleasure. Ratchet and Clank meant a lot to me as a kid, and Rift Apart scratched a certain itch I've had for the series after all these years. It plays and looks fantastic, with great performance and wicked fast loading times. They took advantage of the PS5's specs well, and the extra controller vibrations and features enhanced the experience for me a good deal. The guns and wall-running were especially satisfying.
Though the game unsurprisingly fumbles the writing pretty badly. These are the blandest hero characters I've played in a game in quite a while, with no real chemistry with each other, other than thanking and praising each other constantly. These are not remotely the same characters from the older games, which isn't inherently a huge issue, but this is just sad. The story is technically competent enough, but it's just chasing macguffin's around until Nefarious is beaten. Yawn.
There's also a problem with variety. There's only a small handful of planets, the same robot enemies show up constantly, each weapon can be used in every situation so there's no strategic depth, and so on. The hacking and dimension sections do help to break the repetition up, but the hacking is just another shooting section with a character we get no context for, so it doesn't go very far.
None of this surprises me, though. Rift Apart reeks of modern AAA game development ethos, and that tends to have some mixed results for me. Great production value, cinematic presentation and ease of play overtake any real serious artistic vision beyond creating a safe, inoffensive product to sell to your target audience (kids and teens in this case, I suppose). However, I think they've forgotten that the original games were also made for kids and teenagers, and they didn't feel like they were written for literal pre-schoolers.
BUT. That being said, it's still a fun game if you can get past all that. R&C 2016 was the last R&C game I played, and it was worse in most of these aspects. So it's at least a big improvement from where the series was a while ago.
Though the game unsurprisingly fumbles the writing pretty badly. These are the blandest hero characters I've played in a game in quite a while, with no real chemistry with each other, other than thanking and praising each other constantly. These are not remotely the same characters from the older games, which isn't inherently a huge issue, but this is just sad. The story is technically competent enough, but it's just chasing macguffin's around until Nefarious is beaten. Yawn.
There's also a problem with variety. There's only a small handful of planets, the same robot enemies show up constantly, each weapon can be used in every situation so there's no strategic depth, and so on. The hacking and dimension sections do help to break the repetition up, but the hacking is just another shooting section with a character we get no context for, so it doesn't go very far.
None of this surprises me, though. Rift Apart reeks of modern AAA game development ethos, and that tends to have some mixed results for me. Great production value, cinematic presentation and ease of play overtake any real serious artistic vision beyond creating a safe, inoffensive product to sell to your target audience (kids and teens in this case, I suppose). However, I think they've forgotten that the original games were also made for kids and teenagers, and they didn't feel like they were written for literal pre-schoolers.
BUT. That being said, it's still a fun game if you can get past all that. R&C 2016 was the last R&C game I played, and it was worse in most of these aspects. So it's at least a big improvement from where the series was a while ago.