Recently I’ve been streaming older games through the PlayStation Plus classic catalogue, trying to rekindle my youth now I’m on the cusp of turning 30. I started with one of my favourite game series from when I was a young lad, Ratchet and Clank.
I started of course with the original ratchet and clank from 2002, though the classic catalogue on the PlayStation store is from the 2012 HD remaster. With this in mind I can’t really rate the graphics from 2002 however I do remember them being quite decent for the time. This HD remasters graphics are nice, everything’s a little bit brighter and crisper and on par for ps3 games of the time.
One thing I can rate this game on is its gameplay. It’s very fun and simple, there’s no real aiming for the weapons you use and movement is again fairly simple. On one hand I would commend this simple style as this game is aimed at kids, but on the other hand some strafing with weapons wouldn’t be a bad thing. The enemies are fairly basic and not designed for crazy combat, they’re happy standing still while you swing your wrench at them or lob explosives in their general direction.
This easy enemy rule does not however apply to the games final boss. For some reason the difficulty massively spikes for the end of the game. I didn’t really encounter any issues all the way up until this point in terms of difficulty, but the end boss took me quite a fair few attempts and rage quits. This coming from a seasoned gamer that’s almost beaten the tutorial boss on dark souls.
Story wise this one’s pretty simple, good guy with sidekick against a bad guy, fallen hero in captain quark, the usual. Again tho with this game aimed at kids I wouldn’t expect any more and I think this is more than enough.
Overall I’d give this game a 7/10, positively tasty.
It’s good and it gets a bonus point for starting off the franchise that firmly became one of my favourites ever. The next games I know will get higher scores and I look forward to getting onto them.
Reviewed by MoonHead
Released 4th November 2002 on Sony Playstation 2.
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