This review contains spoilers
To say I had a lot of apprehensions before starting the game would be an understatement. I knew the bad reputation it got since 2016 and I was ready to dislike the game but well I had quite a pleasant surprise.
To be clear from the start, story wise it's a complete fail and clearly the worst main game of the franchise except for one thing. What the game does right is the treatment of Qwark which is WAY more interesting and relevant than what has been done with the character since R&C3. Making him jealous of Ratchet because he is a real hero and making him insecure is a great thing that I would have liked happened in the main storyline but it might be too late now to introduce it in the series and make it relevant given how stupid they made him. For the rest it's a complete disaster, Ratchet lose his selfish side he had in the first game (which 2016 remakes) that was what made the first game interesting, Ratchet becoming a hero thanks to Clank influencing him to be a better person was cool. I believed in the friendship of Ratchet and Clank because it was built in bitterness and discord. Here they never argue and this link to one of the main problem of the game which is Clank being USELESS and having no personalities at all he is just a jetpack and nothing else, completely irrelevant to the story. Which is funny considering the fact ACiT ended with Ratchet asserting that Clank is his friend and not his acolyte, they are a duo not a hero and his sidekick. Still on the thing I didn't like about the story is the the new characters. I don't mind erasing characters to add new ones but make it at least relevant, creating cool new designs for Brax, Victor and Cora just for them to be irrelevant to the story is useless, just put the Qwark Force Team if you don't do anything with the new characters. And last but not least, they completely erased what made Nefarious a pretty cool villain, first thing being is human design that is way less cool than his robot one. And to add to that what was cool with Nefarious (and said in the games directly) is that he was a genius but also a complete bufoon with stupid goals and stupid backstory while also being a looser. Here he juste became a random mad scientist you can find in any piece of media. So yeah that's basically it story wise. The staging is really cool and the graphic update helps it a lot by feeling way more dynamic.
Gameplay wise it's also a juge improvement, maybe even bigger than what TOD was when enterring the PS3 era.
To be clear from the start, story wise it's a complete fail and clearly the worst main game of the franchise except for one thing. What the game does right is the treatment of Qwark which is WAY more interesting and relevant than what has been done with the character since R&C3. Making him jealous of Ratchet because he is a real hero and making him insecure is a great thing that I would have liked happened in the main storyline but it might be too late now to introduce it in the series and make it relevant given how stupid they made him. For the rest it's a complete disaster, Ratchet lose his selfish side he had in the first game (which 2016 remakes) that was what made the first game interesting, Ratchet becoming a hero thanks to Clank influencing him to be a better person was cool. I believed in the friendship of Ratchet and Clank because it was built in bitterness and discord. Here they never argue and this link to one of the main problem of the game which is Clank being USELESS and having no personalities at all he is just a jetpack and nothing else, completely irrelevant to the story. Which is funny considering the fact ACiT ended with Ratchet asserting that Clank is his friend and not his acolyte, they are a duo not a hero and his sidekick. Still on the thing I didn't like about the story is the the new characters. I don't mind erasing characters to add new ones but make it at least relevant, creating cool new designs for Brax, Victor and Cora just for them to be irrelevant to the story is useless, just put the Qwark Force Team if you don't do anything with the new characters. And last but not least, they completely erased what made Nefarious a pretty cool villain, first thing being is human design that is way less cool than his robot one. And to add to that what was cool with Nefarious (and said in the games directly) is that he was a genius but also a complete bufoon with stupid goals and stupid backstory while also being a looser. Here he juste became a random mad scientist you can find in any piece of media. So yeah that's basically it story wise. The staging is really cool and the graphic update helps it a lot by feeling way more dynamic.
Gameplay wise it's also a juge improvement, maybe even bigger than what TOD was when enterring the PS3 era.