Ya GIRL has a PROBLEM she is just hoovering up Ratchet games like she needs them to live, I’m not even very sick anymore, there was no real reason for me to spend thirteen hours of my Saturday playing through Up Your Arsenal in one sitting, and yet here I am, having done that, refreshed the following morning and ready to talk about this mess.

It’s not a secret that Insomniac Games worked under intense, nonstop crunch for basically the entirety of the PS2 and PS3 eras, with their steady stream of annual releases (sometimes multiple games per year) that didn’t stop even as they split into multiple simultaneous franchises, smaller mobile and PC games, and eventually steady VR development. While these conditions would undoubtedly continue to get worse over time, their effects on the games themselves are immediately noticeable, and I think Up Your Arsenal is the first time a game really obviously feels rushed and unfinished after its sub-year in development. It’s impossible to say why exactly this happened, of course. It would be easy to point at the new, very cool and full featured multiplayer mode as something that took away time and resources from the main game, but these are the kinds of things that can be planned for, and the significantly higher number of nearly-complete features cut late in development found in the bonus level and mentioned in developer quotes in interviews over the years suggests a project that was generally messy rather than a specific mistake in the planning stages.

Regardless of HOW it happened, though, you can certainly feel it in the bones of this game, which is sparser both in design and in aesthetic accoutrement. Essentially all the side activities of previous games are gone bar the arena from 2, which is now just its own singular level rather than two separate areas built into other environments, and the number and variability of challenges is stripped back accordingly. The crystal gathering scavenger hunt quest zone returns in the form of a sewer maze rather than two large open areas, and while I think that in actuality there is not much lost in terms of actual play when your movement is restricted like it is in these narrow pipes, highlighting how bland and thoughtless these areas are just makes the ones in Going Commando look worse, it doesn’t make the one here seem more fun. There are at least two levels in the main game that are straight up just multiplayer maps which is never a great sign, and both of them are examples of this other thing the game does that I’m not a fan of where several of the worlds in this game are kind of padded with these short missions where you’ll run through the same maps or chunks of maps with slightly different but very repetitive objectives with a cash reward at the end. These are framed as part of this game’s War Storyline but they can’t get away from feeling like desperate filler to make Up Your Arsenal match the first two games in length. Even GRIND RAILS are gone entirely, an element that in my mind are iconic to the series. Just not here. There IS the addition of a whole separate little five level side scrolling platformer and it’s FINE but it doesn’t feel like, SUPER good to control. I’m not exactly weeping over a lot of this stuff, I’m on the record as basically hating all the minigames from Going Commando, but I’ll get around to the streamlining of the actual level design in a bit, and when it’s all taken together I was definitely feeling the lack of Stuff here compared to previous entries.

It’s not just content, though, the game looks and feels a little off, too. The HUD is this hideous pissy yellow/gold shade that occasionally blends with environments to make it hard to read during gameplay and it is actively hard to parse in the menu when you’re trying to assign stuff to your quick select. The colors and themes in the areas have some creative highlights, like the criminally short robot discotheque moon or Dr. Nefarious’ underwater base system and the accompanying neon sewers, but the colors are looking pretty washed out for the most part here, and there are a lot of like, Grey City or Desert World maps. It really feels like stuff like a futuristic tv set should be a lot more interesting than “a series of grey rooms and one of them has an ugly pattern on the floor.” These visual downgrades are ESPECIALLY noticeable when you revisit Metropolis, one of the most iconic locations from the first game, reusing it’s incredible music track, and everything just fails to pop in the same way it did before. A lot of things that the games once paid a lot of attention to and in my opinion heavily characterized the series, like introductory cutscenes for planets and characters within levels are almost entirely absent now.

Where once most planets had unique enemies, or at least in the second game there were narrative justifications for why certain enemy types would recur regularly, here the roster of guys you’re fighting feels downright inadequate, and the weapons you’re fighting them with start to feel actively bad for the first time in the series. This isn’t because the weapons themselves aren’t fun or cool because they are, Insomniac is still batting pretty high on the designs themselves, but enemies just don’t respond to most weapons in the same ways they used to in a way that’s actively detrimental to the experience. I’m on the record as thinking the damage scaling phasing out earlier weapons is generally a good thing both because it incentivizes you to use other stuff and because the later weapons tend to be more creative and fun to use. But even when guns were less useful for damage in the second game, enemies still flinched when you shot them with a shotgun, they still reacted when they were hit by a missile. Here you can unload a dozen shots into a guy and he will just tank them like nothing has happened until his death animation. Perhaps this is an intentional choice to make things more challenging for you, tuned against Up Your Arsenal offering a fully mapped third person shooter style control scheme that makes shooting and maneuvering simultaneously a lot easier for the player, but it feels bad! Feels like shit!

Which is a shame because Ratchet really has never controlled better. His jumps are tighter and you have the most control over them, the quick wheel has been expanded so there’s less time managing the menus, gadgets have largely been pared down to contextual actions and button prompts that MOSTLY work intuitively when they should, but the few that are still active items feel necessary. It is cool that they keep finding ways to streamline the way Ratchet and Clank feels without paring down the things Ratchet can DO. It’s kind of a bummer then how little of that gets incorporated into the level design. It feels weird to me to be this person who is saying “bah humbug where did my platforming go” because I am generally in favor of experimentation and following your nose and clearly Insomniac’s nose is leading them down the path that these games should be bouncy third person shooters, and conceptually I am completely okay with that. I would embrace it. Where I think my issue starts to take is with how much tease there is of the really cool platforming experience we could have had. There are maybe three levels in this game that feel pretty solidly like an original Ratchet and Clank level and baby they sing they slap so fucking hard when you’re jumping and shooting and using your hookshot thing and running around and it’s frantic and asking a little bit of precision from you? It’s cool, it feels great. I wish we would either go harder on that stuff, make the experience more even, or settle more confidently into the game we’re really making here, which, to their credit, they do well when they do it, which isn’t as often as I’d like.

Aside from those old-style levels we’ve essentially fully ditched the classic Ratchet donut shaped levels where every zone as two or three paths to take from the starting point that all kind of spiral out to their reward and then back around to that initial hub. Most of the levels in the game are just a straight shot now, which is not truly so terrible a thing in the context of the shooter we want to be, but does make it harder to hide secrets and kind of highlights how much more engaging that old style of level is comparatively. My hope is that future games will refine this linear level design into something more engaging rather than something that just feels boring. Here it’s a middle ground – the levels themselves were rarely the biggest issue I had but I do notice the change in philosophy, and it was initially pretty jarring. There are a few times where they do plop you down for missions in small open world areas with a little list of objectives to complete, simple things like kill these four guys or shut down these four thingies, but the freedom of approach offered there works pretty well for Ratchet’s game design, the most fun I’ve ever had with a Far Cry Outpost lol. More importantly, even though one of those is a mission on one of the multiplayer maps, those two levels just show a more creative approach to objectives that prove there’s variety you can do in this space, and that kind of thing would be welcome as something to explore further in the future imo. I also want to shout out the Clank levels which are as sparsely placed as ever but I do think they’re the best they’ve ever been here, with the extraneous additional mechanics from the second game cut in favor of a much more puzzle friendly one and slightly more open design. They’re neat, wish there were more of them so they could be designed more complexly.

This was the first game Insomniac ever made where they had professional writers but I would not fucking be able to tell you that from playing it!!! The plot of this game is truly dire, an unpleasant, nonsensical mess that doesn’t hang together, is largely unfunny, and continues all of the worst trends of this series without offering anything else to balm the wound. I don’t really know what to say about it. Uh, so, Ratchet and Clank go back to their galaxy because it’s being invaded by the robot army of this guy named Dr Nefarious, who is also a robot, and wants to exterminate all organic life. Ratchet and Clank immediately get drafted by the galactic army, more because Clank is now a famous tv and film actor (???) than because anyone seems to remember that they are big time heroes, and it comes to light that disgraced hero and two time villain Captain Qwark was responsible for defeating Dr Nefarious in the past, so everyone decides to go get him because he might have some secret to do it again (???). So after a trip to a BIG TIME RACIST jungle planet populated by primitive monkey aliens who wear vague tribal masks where Qwark has been hiding, he’s put in charge of the fleet despite his obvious ineptitude, then kind of nothing happens for like eight hours, then robot Britney Spears is also anti-organic and you kill her, then you kill and evil clone of Clank that Dr Nefarious made because he thought Clank’s tv show was real and got mad when Clank didn’t hate organics (???) and then Dr Nefarious maybe kills Qwark but not really and Ratchet scolds him for being a coward and Nefarious turns everybody into robots and then you destroy his big robot with an inspired Qwark’s help and I guess everyone gets turned back from being robots because they’re fine in the ending, which is mostly a Clank James Bond joke and not actually about this game. Okay? Okay.

Can you see how from just like, typing out what happens things seem kinda fucky here? Like don’t get me wrong I think the plot of Going Commando is a hot turd but that game at least like, has a story and is about things? It’s just badly told. I DEFY you to tell me what Up Your Arsenal is about. What are the themes of Up Your Arsenal. The satirical element of the series is basically gone here. We’re not really commenting on consumerism, on capitalism, on arms dealership, on the corrupting influence of celebrity. We’re kind of sort of playing with that in the way that Clank’s star has risen and Ratchet’s has fallen based on their roles in this weird James Bond Parody that seems only to be here for some strangely out of place jokes, but that doesn’t really say anything about the characters or the world, and only loosely gets them an in with Evil Britney Spears Robot that could easily have happened any other way – these guys are already famous! So we’re kind of making james bond jokes, we’re kind of doing war movie pastiches which make up most of the gameplay (isn’t it funny when a robot says stay frosty? Guys?), we’re doing a lot of WEIRD early 2000s race humor like what the fuck is up with this robot plotline.

Dr Nefarious’ whole thing is that he hates organic life and wants to kill all of them. He never really says why; we know from flashbacks that he was bullied by Captain Qwark as a teen, but oh yeah lmao he’s a human guy in those flashbacks? He’s not a robot?? And him becoming a robot is never mentioned he just is one between two of the flashbacks there is not inciting reason for this. He claims to Clank that robots are like, secondary to organic life at one point but we’ve never seen evidence of this? In the previous games and in this one robots are victims of slapstick comedy and of the machine of capitalism but in basically equal measure with organic guys. This isn’t a Star Wars scenario where robots are just openly slaves they really do seem to just be guys, so if you want to make a racism metaphor you have to do at least a little bit of world building or demonstrating with characters on screen that this is a thing, right? But maybe not because then you’re running the risk of doing a Marvel style “the bad guy is right but too much” sort of thing and I can see why you wouldn’t want to have the villain of your funny kids’ game whose name is DOCTOR NEFARIOUS be the victim of actual hate crimes? I don’t know it’s a really fucking weird needle to thread, it’s a weird thread to tug at, and the game just kind of tugs it recklessly for NO payoff. The payoff is we get to make jokes like “you squishies can’t dance” and the president, after everyone is turned into robots, putting on a mask or something and being like “I’m half robot see you should vote for me!” like damn a Bill Clinton joke like six years too late very cool guys lmao. At one point Ratchet is like, oh man we gotta stop Nefarious from turning everybody into robots, and then he looks sheepishly at Clank and says “err not that there’s anything WRONG with that” like what the fuck are we DOING here man????

When your satire isn’t about anything and the jokes become this shotgun spread of unfocused spaghetti, some of it’s gonna stick to the wall for sure, and some of the goofs in this game ARE funny, but damn like a what cost?? There are so many weird little bits that just seem wrong to me. Why did we bring back so many characters from the first game? Was Skid McMarx a fan favorite? Was Al, the guy who gave Clank his helicopter mode or whatever, were people desperate for that random shopkeeper to show up again? Based on how unfunny they are here I sure fuckin’ wasn’t. Angela from the last game is gone and like yeah sure whatever, but Ratchet has a NEW girlfriend of the week, Sasha, who is like his handler, and there’s a part early on where the president’s city is being attacked by robots and a transmission cuts and she goes “DAD!” and that’s how Ratchet and Clank and you find out that she’s the president’s daughter, information that never comes up ever again and has no bearing on anyone’s characters and doesn’t even really add stakes to any of the multiple scenes where the president or Sasha are endangered in the game. It just doesn’t matter! Qwark’s return to the limelight, the thing he’s craved forever, is largely wasted because of how little the game has to say about it. There’s nothing about the way the world reacts to this or the characters around him, everyone except Ratchet is just happy to have him back and earnestly thinks he’s a big hero who’s going to save the day, despite ostensibly knowing of his now many crimes, which do come up here! It would be one thing if these things were used thematically, to comment on the way status and power let you get away with evil without consequence, which has been a running theme of the series UNTIL NOW but that’s clearly not what is happening here – rather now the tone is being pushed to outright farce, where every character is just openly stupid, and it’s jarring, and it feels inappropriate. Qwark himself is the only character who gets an sort of arc in the game, and it’s a pretty good one, as he’s finally given some internality and confronted with a genuine desire to earn the adulation he craves rather than contentedly cruise on past achievement or falsely crafted recent ones. But it’s mishmashed into the rest of this which is all just noise. It’s hard to write coherently about it because it’s not a coherent story. It’s barely a coherent set of jokes.

The funniest joke in the entire game is made entirely by accident, where in a Qwark segment the game has the straight man narrator say that robot ghost pirates are the stupidest thing he’s ever heard, and implies that’s a sign of creative bankruptcy and a cash grab, which is an INCREDIBLE self-own considering where this series is going to go very soon. A truly miserable low point for the series, and I hope it stays that way.

My time with this series so far has been defined by frictions. Design sensibility vs limits of controls, ambitions that exceed the scope of the projects, a constant feeling that I’m wrestling with games that are in some ways very close to ideal and in others falling well short of expectations that it feels like they themselves have set for me at various points. There has yet to be a truly great one of these in my eyes, but there have been three really mixed successes; it’s just that the things that are successful in each game vary. Up Your Arsenal does seem to be setting a worrying trend though, where the game is a LOT more fun in the moment than it is to think about out of my hands. I hope this feeling doesn’t continue, because I do think at this point that I’m in it for the long haul.