A surprisingly good entry to a series I'd never played.

by shaunage

I've spent the last few days playing right through Ratchet and Clank Future: Tools of Destruction and I liked it a whole lot. This is the first Ratchet game I've played, but I'm now considering going back to play the four (five?) PS2 installments. Is Jak and Daxter this good? I've never touched those either. The genuinely funny intro movie. I was initially a little disappointed by the graphics,...

The genuinely funny intro movie.

I was initially a little disappointed by the graphics, since I'd heard it looked identical to a Pixar movie, which is not the case. Those expectations out of the way - yes, it's a great looking game. Probably the best looking cartoon-style game I have ever played. The masses of different weapons are nice and there's good reason to use all of them because it lets you level them up and see how they change. Until the last 1/4 of the game I was mostly just using a weapon until it hit level 5 and then never touching it again. Consider me stunned by how useful the flame thrower is. Those are usually a throw-away weapon.

You visit an ENORMOUS number of planets in the game, most of which look completely different to all of the others. The levels are mostly just a little bit shorter than you'd expect, which works to the game's advantage, making sure you never get bored of one location. I think I could probably spend another 15-20 hours going for 100% but I'm going to leave it there. There is a LOT of replay value in Tools of Destruction.

Complete coincedence leads to this week's online release of Ratchet and Clank Future: The Quest For Booty. I'll very probably go straight on and play that. Good to see a downloadable full game that I have no problem with buying that way. Siren is just too big of a download to justify the slightly cheaper price and the novelty of having downloaded a full game on a home console. The disk version of Siren (and No More Heroes) is in the mail now. I think this time I actually HAVE run out of games to buy. I'm not paying anywhere near that much for Force Unleashed or Too Human, though I'd like to play through both at some point.