Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart

10/10 from ~~Official~~ Play~~Station~~ Magazine.

KK wrote:10/10 from ~~Official~~ Play~~Station~~ Magazine.

Well that's just stupid, because while it's a great game, it's riddled with navigational inconsistencies (explore! But not this bit which looks like all the other bits so INVISIBLE WALL), and has many a place where you can just get stuck on geometry and so on. This alone means it's 9/10.

It's buggy in places and a lot more meandering than some of the older games but still brilliant. It's not a 10, but it's definitely a 9 for this stage in the current console generation.

I started this last night after my girlfriend played and finished it over the weekend when I was away, so I'm going in fresh.

First off it looks incredible, genuinely next-gen with the amount of things going on, which is the first time I've felt that with a PS5 game.

I've accidentally been almost sequence breaking and certainly solving platforming sections in unintended ways by jumping off the scenery - there was one collectible that clearly was supposed to be reached by wall running for example that I platformed up to a different way, and in an area where you are supposed to jump across boxes on conveyor belts I just ran past and jumped my way up at the end. This has been fun and I don't really want to complain about it - I loved doing similar in Mario Odyssey with cappy jumps - but I will say it could be more obvious what the intended way of doing something is! It hasn't been my intention to skip parts of levels that I've accidentally skipped just because I was exploring looking for collectibles. What's also frustrating is that I will often run into invisible barriers or parts of the scenery that just inexplicably can't be jumped on. It's annoying seeing a platform and then discovering it has just been decided by the developers you can't stand on it - even though you could reasonably jump onto it.

What is really a downer for me though is how the game treats death and progression. I'm playing on hard, died pretty early on and the encounter reset. Cool, I thought, I'll give it another shot - only to almost immediately level up (thus doubling my health). I had got much further into the encounter before I died so it seems that XP gets carried over after death - which cheapens the whole idea of replaying an encounter and doing better. I really feel like I was cheated out of beating the encounter legitimately. It's not even a choice - as far as I can tell there is no way of manually saving or loading from a manual save, so I can't force the encounter to reset when I die by reloading to a save of my choosing.

Later on I hit another issue in another encounter. Midway through I fell into some purple goop not realising it was an insta-kill and the game respawned me through a rift (this itself was confusing - it wasn't immediately obvious I had died but I'm pretty sure that's what happened). The encounter didn't reset though, it just respawned me mid-encounter and I carried on. What's the point in dying if I don't even have to try the encounter again?

I don't want mid-encounter checkpoints and I don't want XP carrying over after death. That's really cheapened the experience for me and as far as I can tell there isn't a way to work around that with manual saves. Please tell me if I'm missing something

Sold my copy for only £40, that's one hell of a drop and much less than I expected, especially when I sold Sackboy for £45

OR, buzz off and play Dark Souls then :roll:

Buffalo wrote:OR, buzz off and play Dark Souls then

I also hate that I can't save scum Dark Souls though :shifty:

New Ratchet patch targets 40fps in fidelity mode when using 120hz displays.

I left the display mode on fidelity as the default because it's completely unclear to me what the best choice is given I don't have a 4K TV.

OrangeRKN wrote:I left the display mode on fidelity as the default because it's completely unclear to me what the best choice is given I don't have a 4K TV.

Go with Performance RT. The trade-off for that setting is a drop in resolution that you weren't benefitting from anyway.

Thanks! I'll try that out

I'm still yet to upgrade to 4K here was well, feels like the PS5 needs a "all gooseberry fool turned up to 11 but at 1080P" mode. I'd much rather have better graphical settings and performance at a lower resolution than chase 4K myself!

Finished and got the Platinum yesterday afternoon. The last few gold bolts (infinite health + ammo) were used liberally to shortcut the grind to max out the RYNO to see the gimmick in action, and to level up the shield gun to fire back bullets for that trophy. At that point I was feeling like I was pretty done with the game so I just left the cheats on for the final encounter to avoid any potential difficulty spikes or bullshit that would block me from getting there in my limited time. It cheapened the climax greatly, but I'm still glad it's there for anyone as time constrained as I am.

The 40fps mode is a revelation. Hope they make that a common option going forward.

All in all the game was very fun, the new characters are fantastic, and it's the best-looking game I've ever seen, but ultimately it feels a lot like any other Ratchet game. The purest form of an 8/10 game around.

It's deleted now and I wish I'd rented it, tbh

Won this on eBay for £37 so I'm happy with that. Was £32 until someone tried to snipe me last second and raised it.

Playing a bit more of this, I'm torn on whether I'm actually enjoying it. It continues to look fantastic and I've been enjoying the weapons a bit more now I have some more unlocked and upgraded that I'm jibing with. The boss fights and bigger enemy encounters can be good fun - probably made more fun by not dying so I'm not getting annoyed at the checkpointing and XP system! I have also enjoyed the classic platforming genre mashups in the spider hacking shooter and the clank lemmings.

What is frustrating me at the moment is the way the game contradicts itself by encouraging exploration to find golden bolts and raritanium, but punishes exploration with loads of invisible walls and improper geometry. You'll see one area that you try jumping around and get rewarded with a collectible, and then you'll see another almost exactly the same that ends up a waste of time because an invisible wall stops you from climbing up what you can clearly reach. This is compounded by the number of bugs that I seem to keep hitting like randomly falling through geometry and finding places you can end up stuck because you fall between two objects or get trapped in a falling animation. It feels like I shouldn't be straying from the one golden path for fear of the game breaking on me and seeing all the unpolished seams, but at the same time I need to keep doing that if I want to find all of the collectibles. For a 3D platformer this stuff is pretty core to the experience.

Finished. Couple of observations:

Is £47 a good value for this game? :shifty:

Yes. You can run through it twice, easily - challenge mode, unlocking new stuff.

Wait is that right? Literally ever other R&C game was like that.

BOR wrote:Is £47 a good value for this game?

I paid full price, and I enjoyed it. I didn’t rush though the game to nab the platinum fast, and took my time exploring every nook and cranny.

I don’t regret it. If you fancy a bit of a challenge, play it above normal difficulty. Normal difficulty is a walkover.

Cheers.

I've ordered it for £44.99. 8-)

Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart

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