A shock for series vets, but still great fun
Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction was the game that sold me a Playstation 3. Five years later, my PS3 library has crested 70 games, and ToD is still the game I pull off the shelf when I’m looking for an evening of pure, thoughtless fun. Having bought and played the entire Future series (ToD, QfB, and CiT), I was thrilled when Insomniac announced the follow-up to A Crack in Time…until I saw it in motion.
Ratchet & Clank All 4 One was presented as a cutesy 4-player co-op game, at a time when the Wii was still selling a bazillion units a month and Sony and Microsoft were trying to claw back their respective market shares with motion controls and casual games. Obviously All 4 One was nothing more than a forgettable series anomaly like Deadlocked. So I passed on All 4 One, waiting for the franchise’s triumphant return to single player.
Then came Full Frontal Assault—a game that looks like the Ratchet & Clank of old but is essentially a tower defense game. What the HELL, Insomniac? But FFA was only $30, and unlike the trailers for All 4 One, it really did look like a traditional R&C game. So I picked it up, and once I started playing I had a tough time putting it down. Not the multiplayer, because, ugh. But the single player was terrific. Not a traditional R&C game, to be sure, but well-made and fun. What if All 4 One was the same way? Did I made a mistake by skipping it?
Turns out I did. All 4 One is different, yes. The first big change for the series is the camera, which is now pulled waaaay back and not adjustable, much like the camera in the God of War games. A4O is also the first game in the series to run at 30 frames per second rather than the traditional 60. Between those two “limitations,” A4O is the best looking R&C game, period. I personally prefer the less cartoony look of ToD, but there is no denying how amazing A4O looks, from the textures to the lighting to the massive scale of the enemies and environments.
The second big change to the series formula is, of course, multiplayer. As I hinted above, I am very much a gaming introvert. Luckily, Insomniac have me covered with A4O. While you can play with up to four players in co-op, the entire campaign is still playable alone. You select one of four characters—Ratchet, Clank, Qwark, or Dr. Nefarious—and the game provides one AI partner. Given the complexity of some puzzles, the AI does an excellent job. Every once in a while it hurls itself off a platform for no reason or runs in a circle around a puzzle component. But I never once had to reset the game or reload a checkpoint to get the AI to cooperate. Usually just moving my character around the screen a bit was enough to whip the AI into shape again.
In addition to those two fundamental changes to the series, there is a host of smaller changes. The control scheme is slightly different—the right stick now pulls up the gadget wheel instead of adjusting the camera, for example. And a new vacuum gun is permanently mapped to a single button because it is used constantly. More often than the wrench, if you can believe that. And instead of traveling to different planets like it regular R&C games, you actually stay on one planet for almost the entire campaign. But don’t take that to mean there is less variety in environments. You’ll rarely see the same landscape in two different missions.
Speaking of missions, each one is now divided into five or six long levels with multiple checkpoints. Bookending the missions are cutscenes that tell the story of a planet, along with its indigenous people and wildlife, literally torn apart by a madman. The campaign is longer than I expected as well, clocking in between 10-12 hours on a first playthrough, but much longer if you want to collect all the goodies. SPOILER ALERT: the new RYNO weapon isn’t just a gun, but a wearable mech suit!
Otherwise, All 4 One is mostly same Ratchet & Clank we have all come to know and love. It provides a whacky and occasionally touching story; outstanding family-friendly visuals, sounds, and voice acting; responsive platforming; and tons of gadgets that go boom. My only real disappointment while playing All 4 One was with myself—that I believed the negative hype at launch and waited so long to play it.
