Analysis: Ratchet and Clank

DISCLAIMER: While the thumbnail displays "Crack in Time," this is an overview of the Ratchet and Clank series as a whole.

Ratchet and Clank is a platformer employing a huge arsenal of absurd, over-the-top weapons, starring a "Lombax" called Ratchet and his robot friend Clank in a campy sci-fi world inspired by classic space operas and comic books as they battle mad scientists and galactic overlords. It's kind of like what would happen if Crash Bandicoot and Futurama had a baby, employing a sometimes farcical, sometimes satirical, sometimes raunchy sense of humor and a whole cast of memorable characters. It's critically well-recognized as one of the best series of both the sixth and seventh generations of game consoles, showcasing awesome visuals, hilarious writing, memorable artwork, and splendid game and level design.

Evolution -- On Platformers

Ratchet's primary systems are very, very simple, having been derived and evolved from early Playstation games like Crash Bandicoot. Players will encounter every 3D platforming cliche imaginable in this series, including the high jump, the long jump, the double-jump, flight pads, and token invincibility power-ups, as well as many borrowed elements from Crash Bandicoot itself, like excessive use of crates and exploding boxes. Ratchet's set of actions is simple: he runs, jumps, and whacks things with his wrench. Up until this point it's basically a "design by checklist" game and would almost be indistinguishable from the Jak series but for their wildly different art styles (and, well, the whole level design scheme, but more on that later).

The trouble with the "3D platformer checklist," though, is that it outlines a really boring game, saying nothing about the player's progression or sense of reward and providing little in ways to create variety or challenge. The basic melee attack these games employ doesn't lend itself too well to complex or extended fighting, so the player can't be faced with very robust enemies. While the movement controls may be a lot more robust, they still amount to a finite set of actions around which obstacle courses must be built, and those obstacle courses essentially amount to a set of hoops labled "long jump," "double jump," or "high jump," and the correct path is always laid out for players with a series of meaningless collectibles.

If there's a decision-making process going on in the player's mind, it's obvious, one-dimensional decision-making, and if it weren't for the sense of three-dimensional progression and exploration that these games provide the platformer model would be just shy of being an extended quick-time event in that regard. The 3D Mario games are about as close as it gets to the base formula, and even they have the added element of a fairly robust physics setup to help fill it out, in addition to providing a lot of unique ingame events, setpieces, and problem-solving related challenges done on something of a case-by-case basis.

Someone on the original Ratchet and Clank team must have recognized that this wasn't exactly a complete model for a game, because someone decided it would be a good idea to combine it with a huge arsenal of weapons. And boy, were they ever right on the money. The addition of weapons granted Ratchet and Clank a stronger sense of progression and reward within the gameplay as well as an additional tool around which somewhat more multidimensional challenges could be constructed. The ability to purchase these weapons, as well as the ammunition to use them, gave meaning to the otherwise meaningless collectibles--in this case bolts--by using them as the player's currency. Effectively, Ratchet and Clank closed the platformer loop, bringing all the open-ended elements of the genre to focus on the game's weapons and making them the star of the show.

We can consider the basics of platforming in the Ratchet and Clank series to be out of the way as we've already discussed them in detail, so what follows is an analysis of all Ratchet's more unique elements and how they add up.

Additional Basics

Ratchet and Clank employs several other basic control conventions in addition to basic platforming controls; most particularly the ability to strafe by holding L1. This is about running and gunning, after all. The PS3 games added third-person shooting conventions, allowing for more controlled over-the-shoulder aiming and enhancing the use of more precision-based weaponry. Particular variants on its platforming conventions include crouching, double-jumping, long-jumping, and high jumping. Unlike certain other platformers these all have very precise ranges of motion and the transition between them is very explicit; for instance, if Ratchet goes into a crouch from a run he won't skid with his momentum but go straight into a crawl. This doesn't feel inappropriate to the Ratchet series, which employs platforming to break things up and create variation in challenges more than as the primary, driving force of gameplay. It also makes all the movements predictable, which makes them useable.

The Wrench

Ratchet's basic melee attack is a three-hit combo with his wrench. He's able to loop it pretty much continuously, making it ideal for whacking one's way through clumps of small enemies or beating off the odd foe in melee, but it's otherwise a bit weak compared with all the other weapons in the game and puts Ratchet at a lot of risk when fighting bigger enemies than he, which he often does. To compensate for this the developers made it into a very versatile tool; not only is it more efficient when dealing with small enemies, but when Ratchet crouches he's able to throw it like a boomerang, sending it straight out and reeling it straight back in. It only amounts to a single wrench hit's worth of damage, but it's enough to stun most opponents briefly and open them up for bigger guns, and it's long enough range to allow Ratchet to detonate those pesky explosive crates from a safe distance without wasting his ammo. What's more, when in the air Ratchet will use a falling slam attack which has the distinction of doing somewhat heavier damage but also sending out small shockwaves that break crates and pieces of the environment, allowing Ratchet to efficiently bust open a whole cluster of them with a single move.

The wrench is also frequently used as a tool for interacting with the environment, with the game usually requiring Ratchet to turn gnuts in order to open doorways or fiddle with locking mechanisms. In the case of Crack in Time, the wrench also has extending properties that allow Ratchet to sling the head of it across chasms and use a kind of energy chain to yank objects such as drawbridges and, well, other switches. These elements of game seem like simple hoops for the player to jump through at first, but they're rather clever in the way that they're implemented. When the player is turning a gnut to open a door or activate something, for example, he or she must walk Ratchet in a circle around it several times before the switch will activate. If the player succeeds at doing all the revolutions, the switch activates. If the player stops in the middle of it, the gnut turns back to the default position, forcing the player to start over. Being smacked in the middle of turning the gnut causes Ratchet to stop, which means that in order to properly activate these switches, the player has to clear or cull back the enemies in the current area.

It's a very clever method of approaching the standard "defeat all enemies to proceed" type challenge without explicitly stating it or falling back on ham-handed energy barriers or locking doors, making it feel more like a goal that the player sets for themselves rather than one that the game forces on them. The "wrench-puller" switches like the one described above are a simple alternative, only requiring the player to yank on them quickly to proceed. It's ideal for areas that otherwise wouldn't need the "wrench crank" switch, creating a steadier flow for when Ratchet needs to proceed at a more brisk pace. There's several other "switch" mechanics in the series, mostly tied to items called "gadgets," and of course nothing has stopped the developers from using force fields where appropriate, but these are the main two being that they're tied to Ratchet's wrench. "Wrench-pullers" are a recent addition, added as of Quest for Booty and continuing through to Crack in Time. "Wrench-cranks" have evolved since the first games in the series, moving from simply activating things to lending themselves to more sophisticated puzzles that even go as far as rotating huge setpieces. As of Crack in Time, additional variants exist combining the crank-type switch with a pair of jet skates, with Ratchet moving in rapid circles around them and then slinging himself in the direction of the player's choosing; use of the crank usually raises up platforms or ramps for jumps in these cases, creating high-speed, one-way trips that constrain the player from backtracking.

All in all the wrench's versatility both as a weapon and as a tool for interacting with the environment makes it the player's best friend, and there is never a single level of any of the Ratchet games where the player does not use it for one purpose or another. If Ratchet were using a sword or a club or something for his weapon and his wrench were a separate tool completely for the purpose of just these switches it might behave the same in gameplay, but it would also diminish Ratchet's character. As it is, though, the wrench is to Ratchet what the whip is to Indiana Jones, only vastly more underappreciated. If I were looking to make an Indiana Jones game, in fact, this is the exact model I'd reference to define his trademark tool, building a clear combat role and clear, repeatable switch/puzzle mechanics around it.

Guns

Most of Ratchet and Clank revolves around the use of Ratchet's arsenal of over-the-top, usually explosively powerful weapons. They all have some fairly focused, specialized purpose in combat. The more specialized or powerful they are, the less ammo they can hold. The more versatile and simple they are, the more ammo they can hold. It's a simple and intuitive progression. Certainly Ratchet and Clank isn't the first game ever to use this kind of logic, but there's a ton of them, usually sixteen or more in any given game, and they all have their own ammunition. Even in a conventional shooter with ten weapons it's difficult enough to manage them on console controls, but Ratchet has several novel approaches to its interface and game design that make it a lot simpler.

The first and most notable is its user interface; in this case the radial menu it applies for selecting weapons. By simply holding the "triangle" button down the player pauses the game and is able to use the control stick to highlight a weapon; eight total are displayed on the screen--four principal directions plus two in-between to account for the player's directional sensitivity--with simple but fairly memorable monochromatic icons that usually clearly indicate what the weapons do without displaying the entire weapon. By tapping L1 or R1 inside the menu the player shifts between two screens worth of them, making a quick, simple, highly useable way to access the myriad of weapons. There's also a quick-tap that cycles through the last three weapons the player's been using.

The second way Ratchet and Clank helps players deal with this arsenal is in the way it handles ammo. Crates are everywhere, and there's usually at least one ammo crate in any given area, if not several more. They tend to produce ammunition for what the player is not currently using, though, encouraging players to mix up the ones they use and find ways to incorporate them into specific battle situations as opposed to depending on a single gun they're comfortable with. To help accommodate what players like, though, it will also tend towards the last several weapons players have been using. This creates a setup where players can always get a hold of some ammo, but there still exists a certain element of scarcity and a concern that overuse of a weapon will eventually run the player out of ammo. The balance and distribution of ammo boxes also tends to be such that if the player does focus too much on specific weapons--or even specific groups of weapons--they will definitely strain their supply of ammo and eventually run out of it, such that by the end of any given level they won't be able to keep ammo for depleted weapons stocked past somewhere between 5% and 10% ammo. It's a system that keeps the player stocked if they play the game the way it's meant to be played and effectively compensates for any balance issues between the weapons, transforming the ones players are overly dependent on--more specifically ones that turn out to be stronger than they should be--into trump cards in high-stress situations.

Unless they buy ammo with hard-earned bolts, that is. Vendors distributed in various "safe areas" of levels in the Ratchet and Clank games provide a medium for this transaction, and the player receives a steady enough flow of bolts that it's easy enough to stock up. This system was continually streamlined over the course of the first three games to the point it's at today, starting with players having to buy ammo in pre-determined increments in the first game, moving up to simply maxing out ammunition in Going Commando--since bolts were common enough that this was generally what players were going to do anyway--and finally adding one option in addition to that which simply maxed out all ammo in Up Your Arsenal. Prices naturally adjust themselves based on how much ammo players have left. At this point the latter model has been the one common to most of the Ratchet and Clank games, and it keeps micro-management of the different weapons' ammo to a satisfying minimum as well as keeping players in the action. There has been some criticism from a small segment of fans from the first game that they'd rather have the option to micro-manage if they want to, but overall this streamlining is a very welcome addition and, again, bolts are plentiful enough.

As to the weapons themselves, there's simply too many to analyze across all seven Ratchet and Clank games to analyze in depth. Thankfully at this point they follow a pretty straightforward template with slight variations between the games, so we can at least overview them.

Basic Weapons

Advanced Weapons

Weird Weapons

Superweapons and Trump Cards

This list is not all-inclusive, and many other weapon archetypes do exist, but these I've found to be the most common and most relevant to players' interests and I think demonstrate the wide range of possibilities in the Ratchet universe, even among the most typical gun concepts. The balance between them isn't completely exceptional, with more indirect or awkward weapons tending to receive less attention among players, but in general there's the "rule of fun" at work: IE, if a concept just sounds amusing enough, people will want to play with it; so at some point everyone gives every weapon a shot.

HA! A shot! I made a funny!

... I'll get back to the review now...

While the overall situational roles of weapons hasn't changed since the first game, the dynamics of interacting with them goes through drastic changes with every new installment in the Ratchet and Clank series proper.

Going Commando saw the addition of a level-up mechanic that increased the damage, ammo capacity, firing rate, or other variables of each weapon as the player used them more and more. These upgrades are often necessary to take on higher-level variations of enemies efficiently. Higher-level weapons also tend to take many more kills to get to an almost exponential form of growth, discouraging players from focusing on one for too long as it simply isn't as rewarding as using more than one weapon. It's therefore an effective and satisfying means of providing a steady sense of advancement, greater satisfaction in using weapons as the game proceeds, and encouraging players to vary their weapon usage.

Up Your Arsenal more or less kept this format, but Ratchet: Deadlocked changed the game almost completely by employing a smaller number of more basic weapons but providing modular parts that created all the additional variations a good Ratchet game needs. Alpha mods could be equipped to multiple weapons at a time and changed only basic statistics--like spread, firing rate, and damage. They filled in a number of slots based on the level of the current weapon; V2 would have two slots, for instance, while V10 would have ten slots, and players could mix and match these upgrades as they pleased. Omega mods could only be equipped to one weapon at a time, one upgrade at a time, and would have more dramatic side-effects like chain lightning or the release of cluster-bombs and poison effects.

In the case of both kinds of mods there are limits as to their compatibility, so unfortunately it is not possible to have a rapid-fire pistol that shoots explosive shots that spout cluster bombs; just a shotgun that turns things into exploding ducks.

What a ripoff.

This system of weapon upgrades was lauded for the variety of possibilities and playstyles it enabled players to experiment with, but unfortunately did not make for very memorable weapons; a fact much-acknowledged by Insomniac themselves.

Tools of Destruction turned back to the more familiar and accepted form of gameplay seen in Up Your Arsenal and previous installments in the series, and with it came a more explicit weapon selection and level-up porgression once again. However, it added a new customization system based on a secondary currency called Raritanium. Where bolts could always be found in every environment and are awarded for killing enemies, Raritanium can only be found in Raritanium crystal clusters, which only show up in a few environments and don't regenerate--meaning there's only ever a certain amount that the player can get. Certain upgrades do cause weapons to yield more Raritanium, but otherwise it's a genuinely scarce commodity.

The upgrades themselves are fitted to a hex grid setup, with each weapon having its own board worth of upgrades tailored to its particular variables--IE, spread, rate of fire, range, et cetera. There would also be a single, fully unique upgrade with an additional, highly dramatic effect that could be likened somewhat to an Omega mod in terms of its impact. These ranged from being dead-useful efficiency-boosting abilities like the Buzz Blades' Cesium Blade Edges, which caused "dead" razors that had run out of ricochets to stick to enemies and explode for additional damage, to upgrades that were sometimes more liabilities than a help, like the Predator Launcher's Dual Target Detectors, which caused the weapon to fire two rockets at any given target instead of one, often times wasting valuable ammo even if it did effectively do double-damage, and often times precluding Ratchet from firing at more targets instead of fewer as the additional rockets still went towards the weapon's maximum number of lock-ons.

Overall it was a vaguely interesting system, with the hex grid's progression prompting interesting choices and trade-offs for players' relatively small quantities of Raritanium--not that the changes were always that noticeable. It isn't all that engaging or fun, however, due to a few design shortsights. First, the progression of Raritanium upgrades is near-constant compared with the progression of level-ups, so there isn't necessarily that much of a repurcussion for focusing too much on a single weapon. If anything the special upgrades--when they do work well--encourage players to dump more Raritanium into fewer weapons in order to advance to their position on the upgrade board. Second, weapons have a very strange power progression in themselves, which I'll get to in a little bit, and the Raritanium upgrades tend to be superceded by the acquisition of new weapons. It also gives only relatively small performance boosts compared with a full-blown level up, with several upgrades being necessary to come close to that level. This is probably for the best as it's probably meant more to fill in while you're in the interrim between levels, but it ultimately makes the whole system feel a little bit inconsequential and what difference in power it does make tends to work against the series's existing level-up mechanic. As an economic model it's fascinating. As a gameplay model it isn't necessarily bad, but it is kind of "meh" for the way it's executed, with straightforward progression, blitheringly direct statistical changes, and the obvious choices being for players to immediately upgrade ammunition capacity for their favorite weapons.

And favorites will exist. In my experience playing this game I've found its weapons to be the most dissatisfying and poorly balanced of any in the Ratchet series, having immediately regretted firing the first two guns and having focused inordinately on the Shock Ravager--a kind of lightning whip weapon--for the vast majority of the game. Just as a few examples of how problematic the design for some of these weapons can get: the Combuster is more or less the "pistol" weapon of this game; compared with the N-60 Storm from Up Your Arsenal, however, it's much slower and feels a lot weaker. Additionally, its upgrade to the Magma Combuster gives it a three-way spread shot rather than additional speed or anything that would be helpful given the pistol-type weapons' focus in the former Ratchet games. Since you can't really aim shots that go off in 45-degree angles, it's really the most worthless upgrade ever devised for any weapon in any Ratchet game. While most of the other weapons in Tools of Destruction aren't as bad as this, many of them are indirect or less intuitive in nature than most weapons in previous games.

This isn't even the half of the weapon design problems of this game, though. Ideally the Ratchet games' progression involves starting with basic guns--IE, the pistol, shotgun, and bomb types--and then progressing to more conceptually advanced, specialized, or downright wacky weapons. There's a certain perception of greater power as greater specialization means greater power in certain situations, but really it just amounts to more advanced weapons being differently abled, not stronger. Tools of Destruction seems to have thrown this all out the window and developed a clear progression of power from one weapon to the next, such that it feels like the Fusion Grenade and Combuster, which barely felt like they did enough damage to begin with, quickly become obsolete in favor of the Predator Launcher and the Buzz Blades which become obsolete in favor of the Negotiator, which becomes obsolete by endgame due to the enemies' enormously overblown health rating and its poor ammo capacity--and this is all even when these weapons are fully upgraded in every sense. My only guess is that this has something to do with the way Insomniac tried to balance the level-up system against the Raritanium upgrade system, or else someone was very shortsighted and just assumed that later weapons were always stronger. Whatever the case, whoever was balancing most of these numbers must not have been in a great mood.

The enemies' high health could be intentional: in a lot of ways Tools of Destruction's story has Ratchet facing off against nightmares well beyond anything he's faced before, and it only makes sense for Ratchet to feel overwhelmed and that the monstrous Cragmites from endgame would be tough enough to make even the Judicator feel obsolete, but that's a bit unlikely, and it's also not really the issue. The issue is that the most basic workhorse guns aren't even reliable by midway through the game when Ratchet's fighting space pirates. The Combuster and the Fusion Bomb Glove are both so pathetically weak that they hardly make a dent and are barely a viable alternative then, much less at the end of the game--and they have to be the fallbacks because they're supposed to be the guns that you use most frequently. To sum up all of my thoughts on this, though: for being called "Tools of Destruction," it's awfully striking that most of the weapons feel so weak.

A Crack in Time remedies all of these problems, thankfully, ditching the interesting but largely ineffective and overly simplistic Raritanium upgrade system and favoring classic level progression. However, it also introduces the customizeable Constructo Guns, which include a pistol, a shotgun, and a bomb glove--IE, the three most basic weapons of the Ratchet universe. Unlike in previous installments players could customize various aspects of these guns, ranging from cosmetic traits like their color schemes to a series of three dramatic gameplay variables per each gun. In the case of the Constructo Pistol, for instance, the mods include the trigger type (rapid, single shot, chargeable), the firing chamber (beam, pulse, blast), and an "upgrade" slot that added an extra power to each shot (knockback, flaming, ricochet).

Each Constructo Gun follows this pattern, with one upgrade module that adds just extra effects, one module that changes the base properties of any given projectile, and one module that changes the way you interact the gun. The Constructo Shotgun, for instance, has barrel mods that double the spread or double the range as well as ammo mods that double the number of projectiles or double the amount of damage but halve the number of projectiles. Between three variables there's 27 different combinations that make full use of all the different parts that each gun has--all of them dynamic, all of them tailored to their particular roles as the Ratchet games have defined them thus far.

The beauty of it is that they can fill in for roles that don't necessarily exist within the more specialized or unique weapons; for instance, there's normally a "poison" type weapon in the Ratchet universe, like the Infector in Up Your Arsenal. In A Crack in Time no such weapon exists--except for the Constructo Bomb, which has a "Toxic" upgrade module.