Ratchet and Clank: Tools of Destruction

For the last year or so I’ve been patiently waiting to play the first PS3 Ratchet and Clank title, Tools of Destruction. You see, as I was hovering expectedly over my mailbox for the game to arrive, the PS3 made its transition to offering gamer trophies in an attempt to catch up with the 360. Trophies could only be enabled with a patch, and would not be awarded retroactively... if you had previously played a game, you had to play it again to score the new awards. Figuring it would be only a matter of months for a successful flagship title like RaCToD to gain support, I shelved it, spending the next year watching my esteemed colleague X-34 minus 5R1-6X36 enjoy the sequels on the PSP. Alas, the fabled patch never appeared, and it was high time for me to revisit the mighty Lombax and his rectangular parallelpiped friend. Since I didn’t receive any trophies for playing, let’s be magnanimous and give the game a few trophies instead.

Plotting Points by Tan(x)
Video Game Reviews by a Very Busy Math Teacher

Game: Ratchet and Clank: Tools of Destruction
Platform: PS3
Played For: 16 hours

Silver Trophy: Awarded for including comical robot pirate mischief.

Despite the ugly truth of real world pirate encounters, pirates of the Long John Silver variety are hot these days. Talk like a pirate day, pirates vs. ninjas, and the preponderance of the word “booty” for comical effect have all helped to keep the theme alive, and the Ratchet & Clank franchise borrows heavily from the ongoing trend. Ratchet gets to disguise himself as a robot pirate and dance robot pirate jigs, as well as hunt for pirate treasure and fight pirate dinosaurs.

Okay, maybe the dinosaurs weren’t pirates. Actually, the game is well-populated with the usual array of family-friendly and mildly amusing critters, plumbers, and mutant monsters. Crank gets some imaginary friends called the Zoni who, like any proper Pokemon, spend much of their time saying “zoni” affectionately to each other. The badguy aliens, the cragmites, are entertainingly ugly little ankle-biters that are a pleasure to dispatch.

Gold Trophy: Expand the Quick Select menu to hold more items than ever before, and then supply even more item options than fit in even this expanded scheme.

While the weapon and tool selection in the Ratchet and Clank series has slowly grown more powerful, we’ve lost a little on the quirky side. I lament the loss of the chickenator, despite some kind of penguin bomb being added as an extra device in this game. Some weapons are entirely too powerful, especially the nanoswarm device, which trumps almost everything else.

Regardless of these quibbles, there is still a lot of fun to be had with Ratchet’s arsenal. The Groovitron was excellent… there is nothing like forcing hordes of ravenous alien monstrosities to dance helplessly to a disco beat. While nothing more than a powerful missile, I enjoyed the aptly named “Negotiator.” And the little extra ability boost each weapon gets when you level it up made for a nice goal that keeps you switching to new devices rather than playing the whole game through with one weapon.

Platinum Trophy: For making a game that never deviates from established parameters.

This is a Ratchet & Clank game, just as the one before it and most likely just as the ones to follow. While HD on the PS3 allows a greater level of detail and crisper graphics than PS2 predecessors, the game is wholly derivative of its previous entries. Eschewing new invention in the most conservative fashion, Tools of Destruction features tired characters, reduction rather than enhancement of variety of content, and only the most tried and true of RoC. You’ll see grind rails but no giant clank. A brief plumber appearance but no slim shady. Too much Captain Quark, with no Quark video games or other funny mini-games. Even the inevitable arena feels scaled down, with fewer challenges than I remember from games of PS2 yore.

This is not to say this is a bad game. It is just as good a game as you might expect from Ratchet and Clank. If you are a fan of the formula, and it has been sufficiently long since the last time you played, there’s nothing to lose. Most of the good aspects of the series are still here. There just isn’t anything new, except perhaps for the unfortunate choice of making Ratchet’s girlfriend some kind of rat woman. A self-respecting Lombax can do better.

Will I play it more: If the next game in the series is identical, does that count?