Ya girl is sick as fuck this week which means I’ve been doing very little other than reading comics and playing Ratchet and Clank games so here we are already, back at it again, with a very strange sequel. I feel like the conversation around these games kind of portrays the evolution of this series as a few pretty hard breaks in style – like later we will get to the one where we flip from kind of Attitude Humor to Orchestral Heartful stories where Ratchet loves friendship or whatever and the jokes go from being about how Amazon would shoot you with a gun for money to like, a robot doing the macarena or something. But the first stylistic break, as it’s discussed, supposedly comes right here in Going Commando, where a revamped control scheme leads this series pretty much immediately to its place as “a third person shooter, with some platforming,” rather than “a platformer where your weapons are mostly guns,” or at least that was my understanding.

So I was a little surprised to find that it didn’t REALLY feel that way to me, much. Certainly the game has more in the way of obvious combat arenas, with bigger open flat areas to hop around in with your guns, but these are as often as not designed considerately with interesting terrain and enemy placements so I rarely felt like I was being asked to just charge a room loaded with enemies I was ill equipped to deal with, which happened a lot in the back half of the first game. Strafing is nice to have and the Lara Croft Strafe Jump in particular feels very good, but I ran into an issue where when I tried to shoot while doing this it would often break my lock on and start shooting my gun off to the side. This game wisely scales the damage guns do so early weapons (which tend to be more conventional things like pistols and the absolutely A+ video game hall of fame shotgun here) become much less effective over time, which also means that the weapons that are really the only viable ones in the levels where weapon choice actually matters somewhat have really limited ammo and these snafus did tend to hurt. These kinds of little things defined my time with the game.

There are a lot of THINGS in this game, and a lot of things to DO, but none of them feel quite right, or as good as they did before if they’re returning items or activities. For example, there’s a space combat minigame that you’re forced to engage with multiple times throughout the campaign and there are many optional challenges across the multiple bespoke maps for this minigame you can do too. There’s a shop where you can buy many upgrades for you ship in offense, defense, speed, and cosmetics. Mission objectives are varied, as are enemy responses based on the maps you’re in. And yet the ship feels kind of shitty to control?? Not bad enough to make finishing the levels difficult, just bad enough to make them tedious. There’s only one real enemy type to engage with and they’re not smart enough to be fun to engage with or actively threatening but they also come in such numbers occasionally and your ship lacks the movement options you would want to see in this kind of arcade setup to make up for the kind of floaty controls on it that you’re always in a low level state of being pestered. They’re not too hard, they’re not too long, there aren’t too many of them that are mandatory, and the activity is surprisingly full featured, but it feels like the mark was missed on it.

This is everywhere. Hoverbikes replaces hoverboard races and just kind of feel worse to control and have less going on mechanically. There are glider courses that are again not particularly long or challenging but ARE deeply unfun to break up the pace. There are only like two levels where you play as Clank and his mechanics have been both expanded and heavily streamlined to the point the levels may as well play themselves. Several guns from the previous game return and you get them for free if you have a save from it but they don’t feature the big new levelling mechanic from this game and they’re obviated almost immediately because their damage sucks. The trespasser minigame has been changed from a methodical puzzle to a minigame that is somehow both based around twitch reflexes and trial and error. It feels like there was a concerted effort to stuff this game with STUFF, to make sure you’re always Doing Something, and to generally actionize the proceedings. I just don’t think most of these mechanics got enough time in the oven, which makes sense, because this game had to have come together in, what, ten months? I will give them one though the combat arenas are really cool and challenging areas with like, unique bosses and shit in them in addition to a plethora of neat missions with a wide variety of objectives and big cash rewards, really good time.

The core of the experience though is still jumping on stuff and hitting guys with a wrench and/or bullets and I think that’s pretty much as good as before if not better! I think if there’s less platforming here and an increased emphasis on gunplay it is only to better accommodate the diverse array of weaponry available, which is a little bit more creative than the first game’s, and in tandem with Ratchet’s more shootery control scheme, the aforementioned level design does give them more of a chance to shine I think. God bless Ratchet 1 I did spend most of my time running around in a circle or charging enemies head on. So if the split before was like a hard 70/30 it’s maybe now closer to a solid 50/50 imo, and more evenly weighted too. Where the first game definitely started to lean more heavily into the combat in the last few levels, which did leave kind of a bad taste in my mouth because I DON’T think of that as that game’s strongest element, here you’re still being asked to utilize gadgets and platforming muscles all the way to the end in pretty much equal measure. The most visually and mechanically engaging rail grinding sequence in the series to this point happens right before the final level and I was quite happy to have it be a mandatory bit.

The story of Going Commando kind of fucking blows, and part of that is because this game was again written by people who are not writers but this time the structure was a little more ambitious and complicated and it’s in part because I was expecting too much from the sequel to a game that was ACCIDENTALLY strongly anti-capitalist, written and created by capitalists, produced within possibly the most intensely capitalistic artistic medium that there is today. Really that is on me. That’s my fault.

So it’s been a few months since their previous adventure and Ratchet is getting a little itchy to both have something to do again and keep his sense of importance and celebrity going, so he’s really overjoyed when Abercrombie Fizzwidget, the CEO of Megacorp, a company from the next galaxy over that is way bigger and more evil than either of the two evil corporations from the galaxy in the first game, begs him for help on a top secret mission to retrieve a stolen project from his company’s R&D division. He plays to the duo’s egos by bribing Ratchet with commando training and a fancy suit and ship, and Clank with a cushy corporate job, and away they go, entirely unquestioning of this man, or this situation, which are both extremely suspicious. This is a great setup for an ironic inversion of the first game’s premise. It of course turns out in a twist, I guess, about halfway through the game, that Ratchet and Clank ARE stopping a thief from stealing from Megacorp, but the thief was the good guy the whole time and R&C are actually working for the bad guy whoaaah! And things kind of start to fall apart? Because after being betrayed and left for dead by Fizzwidget Ratchet and Clank are like “pfft he did that by accident let’s go find him” and then they spend like a third of the game chasing this guy around, led by the nose, refusing to believe this dude is evil or that he made monsters on purpose or that he tried to kill them, even after they side with the thief, Angela, who to drive the point home is also an angry scientific genius lombax like Ratchet lol.

The moment of betrayal, where Ratchet and Clank lose all the nice shit they’ve been given poisonously by the corporation and are left to die, should also be the moment where they realize they’ve been played, and snap back to the skepticism of the world and the powerful people in it they had in the first game. This game should be like, premised around the fact that they can’t see the strings controlling them because they’ve joined the Captain Qwark tier of elitism at the beginning, and it is, sort of, but once the rug is pulled nothing changes for them materially or in their attitudes. Ratchet and Clank are broadly the straight men to the galaxy’s wacky and shady antics in this game in a similar way to the way Ratchet was in the first game but they don’t have like, CHARACTERS in the same way that they did, they don’t really react to things appropriately or at all beyond like “oh man we gotta stop the monsters!” which is kind of the only thing they say in the game, over and over again, when talking about their objectives.

If I had to guess at the intentions of the writing team I would think that this was done to make them believe Fizzwidget was a good guy up until the reveal at the end of the game that he’s actually been impersonated by Captain Qwark since before the beginning of the game, who invented the monsters and the crisis around them in a ploy to invent a bad guy for himself to defeat so he could become a hero figure in a new galaxy like he was in the first game’s, but this doesn’t make a lot of sense either, on multiple levels. First this should parallel Ratchet’s character turn, because it mimics his desire to hold onto the fame he briefly had and that was slipping away from him in the wake of the first game, which in turn mirrored Qwark’s motivation for working with the villains in that game in the first place, which led to his downfall and disgrace and current situation. You would think this might, I dunno, lead to Ratchet maybe learning a lesson or something, thinking about it at least, anything? But he doesn’t, this isn’t a game ABOUT Ratchet and Clank really, it’s just a game where they’re our tour guides through a plot that they’re not really personally invested in and have no real reason to care about beyond, y’know, thinking people dying are bad. The only reason they seem to care at all though is because Ratchet is ostensibly working for Fizzwidget which is the other problem here, Ratchet is IN LOVE with this asshole, in LOVE with him.

I don’t really understand why Qwark had to BE Fizzwidget for the entire game unless he was specifically planning to bring Ratchet into it for revenge, which he seemingly does, but then his actual plan doesn’t really have anything to DO with Ratchet and is really about re-attaining his personal status, so then why wouldn’t he just be like, working WITH Fizzwidget, from a writing perspective? Because this game is basically a nonstop parade of Megacorp’s many evils, he’s not a good dude. But RATCHET thinks he is, and when they find the real Fizzwidget at the end of the game, Ratchet is like “oh SIR, it’s an HONOR to meet you at last SIR would you DEIGN to allow me to KISS your BOOTS with my UNWORTHY LIPS my DEAR SIR” like what the fuck are you talking about man this is the most evil person you’ve ever even HEARD OF. The whole thing is just so confused, it’s like, a very simple outline full of really obvious themes and easy slam dunks to make and they just don’t do ANY of them it’s very weird. The dichotomy between making every second of the game about how evil Megacorp is and then having the boss and I think maybe founder of Megacorp (?) show up and be the coolest dude who we look up to is so galaxy brained I do not know how they did it.

DESPITE THIS THOUGH, the margins of the game are still full of the wonderful and fun little details that make LIVING in the world of Ratchet and Clank seem like even more of a nightmare than living on Earth, but are very funny and often creative when they’re in my Playstation. In broadening the scope of the satire some of the jokes are way more potent here, like a school field trip getting a tour of a weapon factory an oohing and ahing at gigantic warheads that decorate the lawn or the increasingly deranged and upsetting violence in the advertisements in this game, less frequent but more effective. I enjoyed the pseudo hippy guy who is found on two planets and tied to two awful sidequests, one of which is one of the worst areas in any video game ever made, but who imparts his “wisdoms” and powers in exchange for fees he insists he doesn’t want or need. A particular highlight was the henchmen squad of the game, Thugs-4-Less, who are mostly a generic “guys who look tough but actually are sensitive and like unexpected things” gag but enhanced by the fact that they’re still extremely evil and murderous on top of that which I thought was nice. Their boss just genuinely cares about their well being, and wants them to get their benefits and their picnic. There are more jokes that aren’t directly related to the satire of the setting too, beginning the series’ march away from its initial themes and towards whatever it’s going to be on the PS3, I guess, but they’re mostly pretty funny as well. Like there’s a random monster you need to talk to at one point who has sapience and is wearing like, a smoking jacket with a cravat and maligning his plight as the only guy in his species who can talk and Clank just says “A burden often accompanies self-awareness, sir” like what a weird thing to include it’s pretty good.

I’m similarly mixed on the aesthetic sensibility of the game. The first one had this kind of cool grungy sensibility, where menus were displayed on physical monitors with crt screens and stuff and there is still an attempt to do some of that but now everything is just kind of a buzzy blue with a sleeker look to it. It’s a similar vibe but certainly a less involved one too, kind of the same feeling as a lot with this game. There feels like there’s less depth to the color palette, with a higher percentage of levels and time spent in similar graying beige-ish factory-ish settings. There are certainly highlights but I think there might just be too many levels in general? I would be okay if these games had like eight really good levels instead of fifteen with some stinkers.

The game is a weird experience. I don’t really want to call it a mixed bag because the core of the game, which really is what you spend MOST of your time on, the running and gunning and jumping, is great, and great the whole time, and really a blast. I have my issues with the story but the optional cutscenes and a lot of the moment-to-moment goofs were really good! The music was outrageous, incredible, maybe on average better than last time. It’s really all that extra content, the story, whenever I thought about stuff for too long the seams started to show. It’s hard to judge an experience like Going Commando, but I guess I don’t really do that here. I liked it, it was fine haha.