David Linderman

I’m a good chunk into the game at this point after finally booting it up last night for the first time, and it’s glorious. The gameplay is familiar, the haptic feedback is a nice touch, the weapons are entertaining, and the visuals are stunning. Load times are virtually nonexistent, the rift jumping is a really interesting mechanic even though in the middle of battles I scarcely use it to move around the arena. I’m also actually a fan of the Rivet character. She’s just as entertaining to play as Ratchet is, and the intertwining story is a nice way to push the story along in an interesting way. It also has options to make the game extremely accessible to anyone, including a difficulty mode in which you can’t die, so anyone of any age or skill level can jump in without any annoyances.

I’ve gone through the first act on a PS5 and my takeaways at this point are not overly positive. Firstly, I took around two steps in the hub world before having to drastically increase the camera speed on the right stick to make turning the camera feel even remotely comfortable. On a similar note, the lock-on mechanic feels terribly clunky. I found myself constantly losing track of whether or not I was locked on after killing one enemy because sometimes I’d lock onto the next, other times I wouldn’t. While locked on, the indicators for whether other enemies are about to attack become harder to read because their perspective doesn’t change when the camera changes with the lock on, making them harder to read where they hover around the character. Without locking on, the attacks seem to go straight ahead of the camera view rather than the character perspective, meaning if I’m moving the camera around to plan out my next move while attacking an enemy, I’d whiff on those attacks altogether. Within ten minutes of playtime I had a dead troll start floating in my face at random. I hit major lag while playing solo at the most random of spots in the second mission of act 1. I’ve been unsuccessful in even remotely finding other players. One I matched up with left before the mission started. The other left randomly mid mission despite us doing very well. The combat isn’t as great as it was hyped up to be, but the potential is sort of there. It feels dull, redundant, and bland.