This game is a short, undercooked, taste of a concept. It feels like an exceedingly polished piece of fanwork. As a product, it's a terrible deal for the price. As a played experience, it is far from the worst Ratchet & Clank game.

I don’t care much for the concept of tower defense games, and given this game’s general reception, it sounds like most Ratchet & Clank fans don’t either. Although I don’t know what makes a good tower defense game, I think complaints of this game’s length is proof that it starts to tap into a flavor of fun before it abruptly ends. Frontal Assault has poppy animation, a soundtrack approaching hummability, and has solid couch co-op multiplayer. Weapon variety is good, and levels are just complex enough to have a few hidden collectibles.

Gameplay overall errs on the easy side, which means the greatest danger is a lower score rather than a game over. Playing it solo can feel a bit restrictive and repetitive, as the nature of tower defense means running back to base and across the map often. When playing with a buddy, there’s just enough happening simultaneously to make delegating tasks feel like a strategic team effort. Though as a duo, the only thing you’re guaranteed to kill is the frame rate.

Trying to play this game online in 2022 was a hilarious exercise in futility. I actually found a single person looking to try a ranked match, which I think started without them confirming to participate. This resulted in my wandering around an empty field until I won by time-out. But I still got credit for the online achievement, so I’ll call it a wash.

In my rating system, 2 stars represents an average, C rank game. I can’t hate Frontal Assault, and think most of the ire directed towards it is a feeling of opportunity cost that effort wasn’t put into making a mainline Ratchet & Clank game. But seeing as I did not enjoy any mainline game released after Frontal Assault, I almost wish Ratchet would have gone the Kirby route and kept trying outlandish game ideas.

As an entry in a series, All 4 One is completely different in tempo, tone, and genre. Taken as a stand-alone game, All 4 One is solid, and for me, captures the spirit of what I want from a Ratchet & Clank game. I can play as Dr. Nefarious and throw Captain Qwark down bottomless ravines! That alone puts it in the top 5 Ratchet & Clank games.

As a multiplayer 3D platformer, I’ll say it - All 4 One has more thought and commitment put into its multiplayer elements than Super Mario 3D World, and a full two years earlier! Rather than being a single player game that your little brother can tag into, All 4 One is designed around at least two players. Consequently, as a single player experience, it sucks. Basic level transversal becomes a tedious chore. But if you have at least one friend, it’s good! If you have at least two friends, it becomes awesome.

All 4 One’s focus on co-op multiplayer is evident in how small touches in its game design nudge you toward communicating with your playmates. There is no camera control, and all aiming is automatic. However, there is a damage multiplier bonus for multiple players attacking the same target with the same weapon at the same time. This mechanic discourages single players striking out on their own, because they will likely be overrun by enemies faster than the players cooperatively shooting targets down one at a time. Weapons can be selected without pausing gameplay, but in multiplayer chaos, this can be hard to read. If every player opens their inventory at once, gameplay pauses. This makes pausing to strategize targets and weapon choice a necessarily cooperative process. I like it!

In some regards, All 4 One felt sloppier than Super Mario 3D World, until I honed in on how its aims differed. Super Mario 3D World is focused on solid platforming challenges, where individual movement and jumping are also combat and progression. It is inherently skill based, which stratifies players within a play session. It is entirely possible for a single skilled player to carry a session, and leave the other players with little to do in their wake.

In All 4 One, every type of gameplay is a pretext for hanging out with your friends. The level design is easy, but you need to work together to cross gaps. Even if one player gets annoyingly far ahead, every player can immediately tether to any other player’s location. (I like this feature because it makes it easy to go back and help friends who have found collectibles as much as help lagging players catch up to the current leader.) There are group quick-time events, which sound evil on paper, but are so generous in their success windows they serve as little more than mini-games to ensure every player is paying attention before the next section starts.

Speaking of mini-games, All 4 One is surprisingly full of them. One level has players fight for collaborative control over a raft by vacuuming paddles. Another plays like Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles, where one player must move a basket of shiny rocks while others fight off thieving bats. An extended set piece put all players on the back of a giant robot for an auto-scrolling arcade shooter level. For anyone expecting a traditional Ratchet & Clank experience, this might sound gimmicky. And it is. But the logic behind the gimmicks makes sense to me - they all create opportunities for every player to contribute to the session in slightly different gameplay modes, in the way Mario Party’s variety keeps attention spans from wandering too far afield.

That said, All 4 One has some pacing issues that hold it back from greatness. Individual levels are long in a way that would be satisfying in a single-player experience. But that same novelty wears thin when you must sit through not only your failures, but everyone else’s. Additionally, new weapons and upgrades are unlocked via purchase per playable character. This means one jerk friend can rush to collect more money than anyone else, creating a cascading effect as they hoard the means to buy new weapons at least one cycle faster than others. Would have been much cleaner to have weapon unlocks tied to story progression, given that simultaneous attacks are a core gameplay mechanic.

As for the presentation, the animation is lovely and the story is who cares. On paper, it seems like the kind of delightful cartoon stupid I want out of this franchise, but my god does it have too many cutscenes and get too much dialog. All 4 One proves it is a true Ratchet & Clank game with the series’ signature god-awful audio mixing. In a game where up to four people can be shooting lasers at once, you cannot have off-screen NPCs lore-dumping without subtitles. Either commit to a cutscene or scrap it - you cannot expect anyone to care what some ugly, keyboard-smashed named NPC has to say about their off-screen life story when I have bombs in my hand and things to throw them at.

I am resigning myself to the fact that Captain Qwark is sticking around. At this point, the series has wall-papered over his complacency in a couple of genocides for long enough that fans joining the series in the PS3 era will not share my hatred for him. But also, Dr. Nefarious finally gets Bowser-ized as both the default iconic villain for the series, and someone who’s fun enough to get invited go-kart racing. His flamboyant outrage was absurd enough to keep me entertained my whole time playing as him. Which was the whole game.

In my review system, 2 stars represents an average, C rank game, and 3 stars represents a fun, B rank game. My score is awarded having played through the whole campaign with a buddy, as God intended. If you’re sniffing at this game single player, expect more of a C- experience. All 4 One surprised me by incorporating gadget and weapon utility into level and enemy design more than some of the mainline games, and adapted to a completely different genre and playstyle. I wish it had a sequel to learn from itself and Super Mario 3D World, tightening some of its mechanics and better pacing itself to a multiplayer experience. Hell, even a re-release on PS4 with improved netcode would have been awesome!

I actually did manage to connect to a couple matches in the year 2022! It was a struggle, with terrible lag and no means of communication, but the earnest cooperative spirit from the lone souls I encountered was touching.

Looking back in recent memory, I can’t think of a single year that’s more stacked with incredible games than 2017. It felt like both indies and triple A developers were pumping out hit after hit: Breath of the Wild, Cuphead, Nier Automata, Nex Machina, Sonic Mania… we could go on and on. As excited as I was for all of these titles however, there was something even bigger on my mind: the revival of the 3D platformer, my childhood genre. 2017 absolutely delivered in spades, with some instant favorites (A Hat in Time), some flawed yet interesting gems (Skylar & Plux), some daunting reinventions that I played a bit of and didn’t finish for some reason or another (Super Mario Odyssey), and some of the 3D platformers of all time (Yooka Laylee).

In the midst of all of this chaos, was Snake Pass. I’d been following the game from its inception to launch day, and bought it without a second thought at the end of March. You play as a cute happy snake named Noodle slithering your way through abandoned yet breathtaking ruins in the wilderness accompanied by a David Wise soundtrack (which by the way, is probably his most overlooked contribution, please give it some love); how the hell could I possibly dislike this? Yet, I found myself getting filtered within a few days; Noodle just felt a bit too sluggish on the ground, and I couldn’t figure out why I kept slipping and falling from the dangling bamboo poles, constantly respawning and losing all my collectible progress because it wasn’t saved until I manually touched checkpoints. So, I shelved it unceremoniously, and wouldn’t pick it back up until many years later.

Let it be known; 2017 me was an idiot. Snake Pass slaps.

The world wasn’t ready for Snake Pass. I wasn’t ready for Snake Pass. I came in expecting a classic 3D platformer collectathon, with tons of jumping, climbing, and grabbing. I was ready for some combat here and there via tons of scattered minions and flashy boss fights, and of course, was mentally prepared for plenty of gimmick levels in the form of vehicle sections, card/fishing minigames, and maybe a turret or twinstick shooter or two. As is, I think we’ve just taken for granted how formulaic much of the genre has become from its predecessors, and that’s totally fine considering the nostalgia that’s baked into these projects.

What I got instead, was a deconstruction of every convention of the genre as we know it. There’s no “jump” button, because you’re a goddamn snake. Instead, you must rely on three basic forms of movement to cling and glide through various floating isles of peril, filled with spike traps, smoldering coals, illuminative pools, and tons of harrowing gaps of thin air itself. The analog stick controls your head on a horizontal axis relative to the camera (think: moving left and right), the A button tilts Noodle’s head up (while it naturally slumps down due to gravity), and the right trigger moves Noodle forward. The controls are deceptively simple to pick up, but quite difficult to master, and successfully navigating and climbing your way through the separated platform obstacle courses while picking up every collectible and utilizing Noodle’s body to the fullest extent is one hell of a challenge that no other game has ever attempted, much less pulled off.

One of the game’s most well known mottos is “think like a snake;” that is, you can’t approach Snake Pass the same way that you’d approach your classic humanoid mascot 3D platformer. Noodle’s body behind the controllable head is both your greatest strength, and your greatest weakness. See, the body actually consists of 35 connected sphere segments much more similarly to that of a real snake, and the game constantly checks to see if these spheres are in contact with a surface or one another. That’s why the classic S shape slither and curviness of the snake’s body is crucial for maintaining speed. It then follows that as this giant interconnected body, if the head moves in one direction, the body will naturally follow too. As such, the body and the head must be considered in tandem to both move Noodle along platforms/structures and anchor Noodle to contraptions so he doesn’t fall off. The possibilities that stem from this are endless; you can dangle the tail from a rotating pole to collect wisps, you could use your tail to propel Noodle up onto a wall and “slither up,” you could wrap Noodle’s tail around a stationary pole and then slowly extend the head and wrap that head around another pole to complete the transfer, and so much more.

Let me put this all in context with an example to better demonstrate the creativity that Snake Pass’s physics and controls allow for. Consider the following segment made up of a wind tunnel and a bamboo awning in front of the wind tunnel, with the wind currents flowing in the direction towards the bamboo awning. The goal here is to collect the red keystone (one of three) to unlock the portal, but of course, it’s no easy task considering the wind will quickly destabilize Noodle and blow him into the abyss.

So what’s the best approach to take? Do you start slithering on the pole structure and wrap Noodle’s body around the closest vertical pole to the red keystone, slowly extending his head until he contacts the keystone? Do you “climb up” the small ridge to the wind tunnel’s front-left and quickly extract the red keystone from the side? Or, do you take the stylish approach and slither up and behind the wind tunnel, “falling” into the wind tunnel core and being blown into the red keystone and quickly wrapping around one of the poles after exiting the wind tunnel to avoid falling off? I’ve tested all three of these approaches and as it turns out, I've found all three to be completely viable. Simply put, if the problem is collecting wisps, keystones, and coins while successfully exploiting Noodle’s body to avoid falling/dying, then the engine and controls absolutely give the player many forms of viable solutions with little, if any railroading into the “correct” choice.

To add onto the degree of freedom allowed, there are two additional tools that further flip the concept of Snake Pass on its head and allow for even more variety with their own respective downsides. Firstly, the left trigger will cause Noodle to tense up and is referred to as the “grip;” doing so will tighten Noodle’s entire body and make it easier for Noodle to stay anchored to pole structures, especially useful during various parts with rotating pole contraptions where gravity becomes enemy #1. The cost here is that doing so will of course, stifle Noodle’s motility, so figuring out when to hold grip and to let go when moving onto the next obstacles is key to avoid getting too complacent and getting stuck in unfavorable situations.

The second additional tool comes in the form of Noodle’s companion, a hummingbird named Doodle. Pressing the Y button will cause Doodle to pick up Noodle’s tail, which is extremely useful in a jam when you need to reduce the weight of Noodle’s body for movement or elevate the tail onto a platform or pole. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve successfully had Doodle do this to avoid slipping off of platform edges and successfully slither back onto safe ground. The con here is that by taking away the active weight of Noodle’s tail, you won’t be able to use Noodle’s tail as an anchor to remain attached to pole structures or as a coil/pedestal to propel Noodle up walls and ledges. Thus, this push and pull through Snake Pass’s physics and various “safety nets” forces players to think critically of how to best control and exploit Noodle’s movement to successfully navigate the dangerous environments.

I’ve joked about this in the past with friends, in that I consider Snake Pass to be the ideal streaming game; that is, I've always found this game to be interesting to both play and stream. When players pick up the controller for the first time, it’s an often frustrating (and admittingly pretty funny) experience. They constantly find themselves sliding off of poles due to not properly anchoring the body onto structures, or bonking the head onto walls and poles while climbing up & down and slipping into the abyss, or perhaps reflecting my aforementioned annoyance at how slow Noodle seems at first if you’re not actively utilizing the slither pattern on the ground. I’m not going to pretend that the game is perfect either; I understand the obsession for wanting to collect every single thing in the stage and losing progress over and over to deaths (even if upon my replays, I did find that checkpoints are not spaced as far apart as I remember and there’s no real benefit to collecting everything at once; Snake Vision to quickly point out collectibles is unlocked after beating the game initially), and mastering the controls and methodology to the climbing and gripping is definitely a hefty endeavor.

Having said that, once I did get a hang of the controls and problem solving of snagging collectibles without untimely doom, I became really affectionate towards the experience itself. It’s really hard to put down what “good” gamefeel is like, but once it finally clicked, the fluidity and sheer absurdity of what I was able to do with Noodle brought upon this visceral satisfaction that I honestly can’t say many games have been able to match. The closest comparison I can bring to mind is finally figuring out how to “fall” into everything in Gravity Rush Remastered rapid-fire or the sheer number of tricks I was able to successfully perform while sliding and skating around in Jet Set Radio Future. If you're curious, just take a quick look at some of the insane shit they're able to pull off in a speedrun back in 2018. Even the game leans into this, with much of the replay value coming from 100%ing by snagging all the collectibles, as well as an unlockable speedrun mode and arcade mode to further put your execution to the test. As trite as this sounds, there’s really no other game that does what Snake Pass accomplishes, and while the learning curve may be steep, I think there’s real value in niche games like this that are easy to pick up yet difficult to master.

So please don’t make the same mistake that I made. Snake Pass is a bold and radical reinvention of everything the 3D platformer stood for, and in many ways was and still is one of the biggest shocks the gaming industry has ever had. It’s a perfect example of how subtraction can lead to innovation, of how satisfaction can stem not just from speed but also from mastery, and as a calculated and focused product compared to many of its peers, it's an emblematic example of how trying to do something different yet realized is exactly the kind of shake-up that we never knew we needed, but absolutely should desperately want and support.

We don’t deserve Snake Pass, but for what it's worth, I'll always be grateful that we have it.

Sources referenced:

How Snake Pass Works

Snake Pass Biology: Getting Technical

The Story of Snake Pass

Snake Pass - Nitro Rad

The Story of Snake Pass' Origin from Creator Seb Liese

Snake Pass - How to Play

Game Analysis | Snake Pass - Reinventing Locomotion

Did you know that this game simulates the weight of each guest, and it can affect your coasters? Each person can weigh between forty-five and seventy-six kilograms, and if a cart is filled up with low-weight guests, it will lose speed more quickly than if guests had high weight values, where it will maintain speed for much longer. It won’t make a difference most of the time, but in coasters like the bobsleigh, it can be the reason a cart flies off the track after working flawlessly for years. This is never explained or mentioned in-game, but it’s a useful thing to know when designing coasters.

Did you know that each coaster type has hidden criteria that, if not met, incur severe stat penalties? The most common requirements are hitting certain benchmarks for drop height, number of drops, maximum speed, ride length, and maximum negative or lateral G forces. For each missed criteria, the coaster’s excitement, intensity, and nausea ratings are usually cut in half, so failing just one of them can make for a cost-inefficient coaster, and missing two leaves you with a money sink. However, the game never mentions any of these stat requirements, nor the fact that they even exist. It can be useful to look them up before designing a coaster, so reloading a save or aimlessly making random tweaks isn’t required.

Did you know that guests will regularly pay more than $10 for a ride on each coaster? The price they'll pay isn't just affected by the excitement, intensity, and nausea ratings, but the age of the ride and whether there’s another of the same type in the park. Also, each stat weighs differently into the price calculation depending on the coaster type, so there isn’t an easy formula to figure out how much each ticket should cost. However, the bonus given to a new and exciting ride is significant enough that visitors will often pay the full $20, way more than anyone would actually pay in real life, especially when framed with the knowledge that this game came out in 2002. The way the optimal price is determined isn’t explained anywhere in-game and is mostly figured out through trial-and-error, but once you get the hang of it, even the toughest scenarios become trivial.

You may have discovered a little pattern in these facts, in how Roller Coaster Tycoon 2 is a simulation game that’s uninterested in explaining how its simulation works. Players are just told to build a park with so many guests or earn a certain amount of money per month, and that's it. It’s fine to let players discover some things on their own, with ride prices probably being the best example, but when designing a compelling coaster can take so much fine-tuning, it would be helpful to give players an understanding of how they’re being evaluated. It’s good to know why coasters might randomly crash, it would be nice to know how scenery actually affects your park, and so on. Since so much is left totally ambiguous, it makes sense that the majority of players simply ditched scenario challenges and made the most lethal or silly coasters they possibly could. I suppose that might be true to the game’s title, being “Roller Coaster Tycoon” instead of “Theme Park Tycoon”, with the most fleshed-out elements being those that surround the coasters themselves, and the rest of the game is just a shallow framework to let you keep building. If you wanted to revisit this game after remembering it fondly from your childhood, the coaster madness absolutely holds up, but if you were looking at it as a tycoon game, there are much better choices out there.

Addendum: I found the best information about how RCT2’s mechanics work from an excellent Youtuber named Marcel Vos. He has videos breaking down all the interesting little details about the game which go otherwise unexplained, and they're definitely worth checking out. Also, for running it on modern systems, check out OpenRCT2, an open-source re-implementation of the game with some light-touch new features, bug fixes, and compatibility improvements. It’s probably the best way to play the game nowadays.

You have to respect the ambition.

When this game came out, my knowledge of Bionicle was "six toys with CGI-decorated cylinders," and 20 years later, that knowledge has not changed much. I do remember trying to play this on our ancient computer with our terrible, not-high speed internet, and never got much farther than the first NPC. But reading the wikipedia article now, apparently this was updated episodically, so maybe there wasn't more to find!

For a kid's toy advertising campaign piece in 2001, this was mind-blowing, 5/5 stars. As a child used to finding terrible flash games (without Google) that barely improved upon the arcade concepts they were plagiarizing, having a full point-and-click adventure playable in-browser was beyond conceptualization. And for free? It's no wonder this franchise helped save Lego. Once I learned this game had been preserved past the death of flash, I jumped at the chance to finish it.

Mata Nui Online Game rides that line of "can't be too good because we're giving it away" while having some inspired moments that show the care that went into its creation. As someone who tried and gave up on making things in flash, I know drawing these highly technical and detailed character models would have been an absolute nightmare, so the variety of animation frames is truly impressive. Beyond superfluous waves from NPCs, there are panning, dolly, and perspective camera shots that would have required so much effort and resulted in so little payout - the kind of touches I appreciate the most.

I will admit I got stuck more than once for reasons beyond obtuse point-and-click adventure trappings. Some screens were only accessible if you went half-way to a location, turned around, and panned to the side. Perhaps this would have been less a concern in 2001, where the commitment to changing areas was so much higher, forcing any kid playing to ravenously scan every screen for every possible point of interactivity. Some of the mini-games were not intuitive to me, either, in a way that made me realize how computer interfacing has changed with the domination of touch screens and track pads. Clicking and holding, holding and dragging are gameplay concepts immediately more graspable with a physical mouse in-hand.

The story was convoluted lore core nonsense purposefully withheld to encourage buying a million toys and increasing multimedia engagement. Character writing was stiff and awful in the way 90's nerds thought something being fantasy / sci-fi was interesting enough to ignore stilted dialog and plot-first padding. In this case, they're almost right, as the ambiguity of the physiology of the beings in the Bionicle universe is intriguing. Are they robots? Are they organic? What do they think they are? How would culture develop in a world and society of beings that looked like this?

2 stars, C rank. An important game in the history of flash and in-browser experiences, but now mostly only enjoyable as a time capsule. You can finish in about 3 hours with the walkthrough, fewer if you realize the game gives you a fast-travel song to play on your flute. Closer to 9 hours if you want to faithfully recreate the loading times between areas from its original release.

A Crack in Time is a prime example of money being poured on a skeleton that is yet unformed. There is no level design. Combat was hilariously, tediously boring even on Hard. The story is nonsensical, retcon-y ameature-hour drivel. But the generic level concepts are rendered with incredible detail, the character animations are the best in the series so far, and the comedic timing with Dr. Nefarious has been honed to greatness. Controlling Ratchet feels smooth and satisfying, and his rocket boots are a great addition to the series. There’s just no substance to support all the elements that are real works of love, a truth that makes me laugh in frustration.

Trying to describe the frustrations of A Crack in Time are akin to when Amazon asks you to provide photo evidence of a package not being delivered. The Ratchet Wiki has lists of planets, hidden trinkets, and side missions, just like many other Ratchet games. But unlike other Ratchet games, where you needed to prod and explore levels to find secrets and rewards, aCiT puts its trinkets out in the open. It puts checklists on map menus and tells you what you’ll find on a planetoid before you land there. The story-critical planets are incredibly linear experiences, but filled with bombastic NPC pyrotechnic displays meant to hide how little the game is asking the player to do.

It feels like a war is happening within the soul of A Crack in Time, as if it doesn’t want to be a Ratchet and Clank game. First off, it splits the two up immediately, meaning Ratchet cannot high jump, long jump, or glide, meaning Ratchet’s platforming levels can only require use of a basic jump. Clank’s moveset is even more limited, but also becomes the primary vector of aCiT’s platforming half of its shooter-platformer genre designation. As a result, both halves feel like watered-down experiences. I expected this split was a tutorial mechanic to ease players into the full Ratchet & Clank moveset, but by the time they reunited, it was time for the final boss.

During the third time the game made me fight a hydra tank, (but this time two at once! Without re-balancing their moveset from their being fought one at a time!), upon Ratchet’s dramatic death animation, I said, out-loud, “This is so boring!” with a sincere laugh. Because the idea that I was bored, contrasted with the visuals on-screen, was absurd. A war between cartoon aliens was happening around me! Space vikings and robot dragons were dancing underneath an exploding disco ball! I had a gun that opened a portal to a tentacle monster named Fred!

But none of Ratchet’s weapons made enemies react in different ways, so all of them were equally useless, their utility externally decided by how much they depleted an on-screen enemy health bar. Enemy shots could reach Ratchet from across the map, far beyond what could be shown on screen, so the level’s layout didn’t matter. There was nothing for my brain to do but jump when it saw a flashing light, and hold down the shoot button.

Luckily the shallowness of the gameplay gives me some room to comment on the story, which is weird. I was going to say it is entirely without women, since none of Ratchet’s females from previous games return, but then I remembered it introduced a whole species of Valkeries that Ratchet kind of genocides. Like, villains from previous games have had ambiguous cartoon deaths to come back later, but the dialog of aCiT says that Ratchet just straight-up killed these ladies. It’s very weird.

Women are so absent from aCiT that it ends up actually feeling kinda gay? We meet a friend of Ratchet’s dad who is real sad that Ratchet's parents are dead. He really loved Ratchet’s dad. Carries around a locket with a picture of them together. But we never learn Ratchet’s mother’s name?! Googling “Ratchet’s mom” brought me to the most hilariously depressing wiki entry I’ve ever seen, where the only thing we know about this woman is she was shot dead in front of her husband? And Ratchet never shows an ounce of curiosity in learning anything about her?? Like her name???

Dr. Nefarious and Lawrence are both excellent cartoon villains, but come from that great Disney tradition of queer-coding their love of evil theatrics and drama. So much so that my head tilted when an in-game news report referred to them as “partners.” Maybe that word didn’t have that connotation in the year of this game’s release. Or maybe it did, and the makers of this game just had no idea what they were doing with queer representation. Like, there’s an armor vendor who looks like James Stephanie Sterling and is very queer-coded, wearing pink, and having an affectation associated with gay fashionistas. But since his role is so minor, no other characters interact with him, (even Ratchet!), so his inclusion almost wraps back around into unironic positive queer representation? I’m sure he was meant to be a joke, but then the only joke could have been “lol a gay alien.” But, since there’s no mockery, no punchline besides a faithful recreation of a fat gay alien, it’s not a joke, just inclusion. This hurts my brain.

I guess it had to have been meant as a joke because Captain Quark is back and spends a good third of the game in terrible drag. I hate him so much and there is no space for him in any of these games past the first. He bloats and worsens every game he appears in. As I’ve said before, I will give 5/5 stars to the first Ratchet game that lets me permanently kill him.

In my rating system, 2 stars represents an average, C rank game, and although I enjoyed parts of it, A Crack in Time is a solid C-. The art direction has aged amazingly, and Dr. Nefarious is wonderful. I did not have zero fun playing this game. But my god, it would have been possibly an improved experience if all the gameplay was stripped and turned into a walking simulator GRIS-style. At least then its shallowness wouldn’t distract me from its strengths.

This is possibly the most pointless game I've ever played, in the sense I don't understand why it was a unique SKU. This is a (lame) level or two of a regular Ratchet and Clank game. It could have easily been DLC for the first Ratchet and Clank Future game, since it was only released digitally in its home country anyway. It could have been the beginning of the next Future game. It could have been an email.

Quest for Booty feels like such a tech demo I feel like I'm rating a 8th grader's rough draft of an essay they plagiarized from themselves. Like, I can't give you a failing grade, because you technically did your homework, and I was able to comprehend it. But robot pirates have souls? But their robot brains can be brought back to life without souls? But their souls can animate heads without their brains? What are you DOING, and is it a regulated substance?

Special shout-out to the woman on the front cover who I will never learn the name of due to her nothing contribution to both this game and the previous one, who even the game hates to the point another named character refers to her as "Ratchet's female"??? Like, they call Ratchet by his species when they're being disrespectful. But she's just species: female. But Ratchet's female. She doesn't even get to be her own female. Even though she's not a lombax! Did the people MAKING this game know her name? Does she have a name???

Where the fuck is Angela?????

Mech designs look sick, but no artistry can save you from how mind-meltingly tedious it is to shoot invisible barrels you can't lock on to. Shamelessly looked up the ending on Youtube two-thirds of the way through only to find that, after hours of nothing, 5 boss fights are crammed into the last third of the game. I do not understand this game.

The story is not a saving grace either. The lead is absurdly irritating but not much more than anyone else. The final boss laments before she dies that "I don't have the functions of a woman now."

Who wrote this?

1/5 It is not truly heinous, unless you count heinously boring.

My nephew wanted to go mini-golfing, but there was a 1 hour 45 minute wait. I don't know if you remember being 9, but that is the equivalent of 10 hours in tax-paying-adult time. But that wait time wasn't going down, so we reserved our slot, and kicked around at some free-to-play arcade machines the facility had set up for just such a purpose.

We played bocce ball, skee-ball, pinball, each time getting progressively conceptually closer to the old video game cabinets. We both love video games - I just got him a Switch for his birthday last week! - and still, even giving a Galaga machine a sniff felt like a measure of last resort. But after 40 minutes, or 3 hours and 48 minutes of 9-year-old-time, investigating them became a necessity.

It's kind of fascinating that we were weary of these machines for similar reasons despite coming from such different perspectives. I know arcade machines were designed to be quarter munchers, while my nephew wondered aloud why a giant quarter featured prominently in part of the establishment's wall art. But my nephew is hyper aware of the type of garbage games and garbage ads that clog up mobile and free-to-play games.

There's an insincerity to colors that are too loud, animations that are too flashy. An intuition develops for sounds that are bombastic and disorienting, but cut or increase in volume when real-world money is involved. These transitions, these tactics, are remarkably similar to modern microtransaction games in a way I could feel, but only saw articulated in motion when my nephew thought the "start" button on these machines functioned the same way a "start" button on a modern video game console would - to skip something annoying and unpleasant. It was the closest parallel his brain could find to clicking the "X" on a mobile pop-up ad in an environment that was triggering the same type of hyper vigilance and annoyance. Incredible.

The first machine we tried was broken, as the grip on the handlebar wouldn't let the waterski accelerate past 8 km / hour. So we moved over to Cruis'n World, our hopes somewhat restored by the Nintendo logo across the top. There were even two cabinets connected, maybe we could race together! Except his feet couldn't reach the accelerator pedal, so we had to tag team it - me on the metal and him at the wheel.

Gotta say, this experience was weird. It took me one leg of one race what it would take him 5 maps to realize: this game did not want you to win. But it did not want you to think it did not want you to win. There were always at least two cars rubberbanded behind you, so you never were in last place. He came in 7th. It was a solemn moment, but he still picked another course and slammed START.

Normally, my nephew is a pretty sore loser, so his tenacity surprised me. Maybe because I was "helping" he didn't take it as hard. But I noticed he was fixated on this game in a way different from trying to have fun. That possibility had already been discarded. He was trying to figure out what this thing before him was.

It was a blink-and-I-missed-it-the-first-time, since I was trying not to mix up the brake and accelerator, but every race started with a context-less flag bearing lass in a bikini popping in and out of existence. That really surprised me! I'd vaguely heard about games being a boy's club in the Before Times™, but experiencing it was different. I glanced at my nephew. His expression was contemptuous and grave. Something about her being there made him uncomfortable, but whatever that feeling was paled in comparison to the game mechanics he was failing to discover.

As true of every generation of kids past the Super Nintendo, his frame of reference for driving was Mario Kart. I could see him purposefully crashing into walls and obstacles with a scientist's deliberation in replicating familiar physics interactions. To him, the lack of true 3D environments was vexing and novel. But their interactions also slowly revealed an asymmetry between his racer and the others - no one else went off-course, no one else crashed into Egyptian monoliths. In Mario Kart, everyone could crash into everyone, everyone could slip on anyone's banana peel. Here, the world simultaneously ignored his existence, and existed solely for him to destroy.

It was this feeling of loneliness that pervaded as he settled into a consistent 4th place finish in his final races. From watching him, I know his technique could have improved. As all new drivers behind a wheel, the struggle was constant in fighting his own over-corrections. But the lack of interactivity with the leaders of the pack killed any motivation to get better. Their victories eventually felt as artificial as the goobers destined to be in last place.

Even though we weren't paying money, the experience still sucked! The menus had count-downs for selecting vehicles and courses, and why? To make sure you didn't hog the seat so someone else could put in quarters after you, whether you won or lost. All transitions were artless and immediate, an assembly line of a game experience where you were both the line worker and the product. It made the smiling beach party bimbos at the finish line feel even weirder and grosser after the human-less "race" to see them.

When we'd transitioned from bocce ball or skee-ball, my nephew had gotten my attention to say he wanted to do something else. After about 100 minutes of 9-year-old time with Cruis'n World, he just got up and left.

In conclusion, I think arcade games have always sucked. I don't know how anyone feels anything playing Pac Man unless it's in an arcade machine, where you have at least 25¢ on the line as a bet that you'd have a good time. But that's the thrill of gambling, not the thrill of the game. And the house always wins.

With the concept of money removed, the bet is still there - just with your time. And with over 4 hours of perceived time still to kill, my nephew decided his time was better spent trying to convince me a scoop of chocolate ice cream was worth four god damn dollars.

This enters the hall of fame of indie games with great concepts in great trailers that failed to disclose the trailer had the one good execution of that great concept. If another team took a crack at this game’s recursive level puzzle concept, we’d have a 3D contender for brain-melting goodness on par with Baba is You. For now, we have this tosh.

Maquette’s base concept of recursive level design feels like it could be as good as thinking with Portals. Every level has a diorama of the level within it, and any object you place within the model is moved proportionally outside of it. This means you can change the size of objects by moving them between recursions, or explore at different senses of scale by venturing forward yourself. The same physical key can be shrunk to unlock a door within the diorama, or enlarged to be used as a bridge. I normally maintain we, as a species, have met our quota of Alice in Wonderland themed media, but I would allow an exception in this case.

Unfortunately, not every level uses this recursion mechanic properly, and others are bloated with vaguely-related but still generic puzzle solving. The proper levels still limit the number of objects used to one or two at a time, and there’s severe gatekeeping to guide the player towards what part of the diorama to examine next. There just isn’t the complexity present promised by the premise. The genuinely brilliant puzzle solutions were so distended by mush I discounted them as possibilities because my opinion of the game’s creativity sank so low in the valleys between the modest highs.

What cratered the game for me from “disappointing” to “bad enough to derisively mock with my friends” was the truly atrocious unrelated romance story that serves as the “reward” for advancing the levels. The writing is the most twee, saccharine, vapid, shallow, privileged, infuriatingly juvenile “romance” story I have encountered in an indie game yet. To call it pretentious does not convey nearly enough contempt. It is so bad and played so completely straight my brain implodes trying to imagine what kind of person thought this would be of interest to anyone, much less relatable, much less of any emotional worth, enough to record multiple minutes worth of spoken dialog. If there are real people in California like this, I hope they die before I meet them.

In my rating system, 2 stars represents an average, C rank game. Between Maquette’s highs and lows, no other rating feels more correct, even though this one doesn’t feel correct, either. If anything, the game feels incomplete, like brilliance was stumbled upon by people who can’t design puzzles. If this was a single dungeon within a mediocre Legend of Zelda game, that game would win game of the year a decade ago.

Continuing my first chronological playthrough of the series, I’m so happy that after the disastrous Up Your Arsenal, the gameplay of Tools of Destruction is good again. Tools of Destruction introduces new concepts that finally attempt to marry the concepts of shooting and platforming while also showing their cumulative limitations. As a series, Ratchet and Clank continues to intrigue me by having a different assortment of strengths and flaws every game.

Tools of Destruction is one of those games that was obviously crafted as a system showcase. The environments are elaborate and gorgeous, with Ratchet visiting such vibrant locales as the interior of a comet and the surface of a star. (However, with so much emphasis put on visual impact, the level designs are more linear than previous Ratchet games.) In addition to the fun and bouncy 60 fps animations, ToD has some hilariously shoe-horned motion control mini-games to show off the Six-Axis controller. Absolutely none of them improve the game in any way, but I find their inclusion endearing.

Despite the general reduction in player exploration, the few optional routes offer some of the most experimental shooter / platforming hybrid concepts in the series so far. My favorite tool of the game was a jello gun that let Ratchet create impromptu jello block trampolines, with bigger blocks resulting in higher jumps. The real challenge, more than trying to line up shots and visualize bounce trajectories, was the local fauna that rushed to nibble my jello blocks away. It was the perfect combination of shooting, platforming, and silliness that emblemized what I want from this series.

What I do not want is the terrible Saturday morning cartoon writing this game this game threw in my face. Instead of a scraper punk, Ratchet is now a lone survivor of Lombax genocide? After Lombaxes genocided some fish people?? Apparently all Lombaxes are inventors, not just Ratchet. And apparently the lone surviving fish person is now a serial genocider galactic conquistador. This species essentialism is such a weird and ugly turn for a game that otherwise has such a charmingly playful look and tone.

The supporting cast is all uniformly boring, annoying, pointless, and gets entirely too much screen time. Gone are the characters from any of the previous games except Captain Qwark. ToD takes yet another stab at trying to make Captain Qwark a bafoonish frenemy instead of a malicious villain, an initiative I will never support as he is responsible for the destruction of worlds. And he’s still not funny! He was never funny, but now his material has degraded to the point of incomprehensibility. I will give 5/5 stars to the first Ratchet game that lets me kill him.

In my rating system, 2 stars represent an average, C rank game, and Ratchet and Clank Future: Tools of Destruction earns a solid B rating. It’s fun and breezy in a way that’s almost forgettable, and is greatly improved if you skip as much dialog as possible. So much of its story feels cheaply dated, down to the pointless Mass Effect-esque dialog trees for the single tool vendor. While it doesn’t have a strong identity of its own, it displays enough understanding of the series’ strengths to make me hopeful for the sequels.

I love everything about this and it is literally unplayable. For a simple rhythm game of Simon Says, the input delay is too inconsistent and the windows too tight. Maybe my emulator sucked, but I could not get past the first level - and I'm a Rhythm Heaven veteran. If everything worked correctly, 4 stars, easy.

As far as rhythm games go, even the first level surprised me with its crushing difficulty (separate from technical friction.) No visual cues to match the expected button presses, frequent changes in tempo, and casually expecting syncopation to the back-beat - all tricks I'm used to other rhythm games saving for later levels as difficulty spikes. Space Channel 5 can only get away with its shenanigans with its buckets of charm.

The choreography is so goofy and detailed, with multiple dance routines programmed based on your performance. It is so simple and superficial in its game mechanics, yet Space Channel 5 still taps into the feeling of power that comes from solidarity in group dance. I absolutely love the mechanic of acquiring background dancers as you succeed and become more famous. Snatching a guitarist from another pop idol and hearing him contribute extra guitar licks to the soundtrack was absolutely delightful.

Watch a full playthrough on YouTube and you'll have a great time.