Naughty Dog and Insomniac Games. If you stem from the PlayStation era, like me, you probably at least know about these two companies, famous for creating Crash Bandicoot and Spyro the Dragon. These two franchises established themselves as mascot titles of the PlayStation back in the 90s, and there's still hard debate going on about which of the two should be on top.

In the PlayStation 2 era, there was a similar battle going on. Naughty Dog came with Jak & Daxter, a fun 3D platformer which was pretty similar to Crash Bandicoot in a good way. A year later, Insomniac Games came with an answer, named Ratchet & Clank. This enkindled the debate once again; Naughty Dog? Or Insomniac Games? We're not gonna talk about Jak & Daxter, that's for another day. It's time to take a look at the first installment of the beloved franchise that is Ratchet & Clank.

You play as Ratchet, a lion/fox hybrid thingamajig who was just working on his little spaceship in his workshop until he notices a meteorite crashing into the surface of the planet, not too far from where he is. After you make your way towards the meteorite, you notice a small robot just laying in the crater. The robot, which Ratchet calls Clank instead of its long and confusing serial code, tells him about an evil business man who's planning to have his troops destroy all life on the planet to make it their home. Clank is on a mission to find a certain someone suited to stop this from happening, and Ratchet decides to tag along for the ride. It's nothing too complicated, but it works for what it is. Personally I'm not too fond of Ratchet as a character, but his chemistry with the more likable Clank is enough to tolerate Ratchet's selfish jerk personality.

For an early PS2 game especially, this game is gorgeous. The characters look neat and the large, diverse and colourful environments are all wonderfully detailed. The animations are great, Ratchet is able to do tons of stuff to avoid enemy attacks in awesome ways. The menus look cool as well, with little pictures next to the options you scroll over, indicating you're gonna undertake. Overall, the graphics are amazing. Near-perfect, dare I say. There are a couple of rough edges here and there, but for a PS2 game, that's something I can easily look past.

In terms of sound, it still does its job, albeit less impressively than its graphics and presentation. Ratchet & Clank has awesome music at times, and the voice acting is rock-solid. There's some SFX missing though, at places where it's definitely needed. An example of this is when during the hoverboard races you'll parttake in, you pick up missiles used to shoot at the competition. There's no sound indication telling you that you picked up the power-up(no visual indication either other than the number on the HUD), meaning you can easily miss the moment you pick it up. This is just an example of missing SFX in the game, and it's a small biggie, but it gets noticable.

Now, let's talk about what Ratchet & Clank has to offer. It's a platformer, but not so much as it is a 3D Adventure game where you get to shoot a lot of enemies. This is fun because there's a ton of diverse weaponry you can use to blast the stuff out of them. The weapons range from a simple blaster, to a short-range flamethrower, to a multi-pojectile rocket launcher. You have your own weapon wheel when you press the triangle button, which you can always customize to your liking in the pause menu. This means you don't have to pause the game all the time when you want to select a different weapon, so it doesn't interrupt the flow of the action.

There's a nice variety of gameplay modes as well. Granted, the dogfight portions of the game could have been executed better, but that's no dealbreaker. Aside from the standard running and gunning you'll do plenty of times, there are places you fly your spaceship and fight in space. The problem I have with these, is that your state-of-the-art spaceship is as manouverable as a brick in sand. Star Wars Battlefront II, this is not. Then there are the portions of the game where you play as a giant Clank complete with missile-launchers and Iron Man's uni-beam. Just Giant Clank, smashing stuff up. These missions are actually too much fun. There simply aren't enough sections where you play as giant Clank... All in all though, Ratchet & Clank has a bunch in store for you, and as a result is a lot of fun to play.

Although, I found there to be one major flaw with this game - the general difficulty. The game starts out relatively easy. Very easy, in fact. The tutorials explain how to use your abilities, and the game throws the ideal bad guys at you to dispose of with these abilities. The game keeps up this easy difficulty level until you reach about planet 3 - where the game suddenly gets a massive difficulty spike. The enemies get gradually tougher, and grow in numbers. You'll be scavenging for bolts - the game's currency - to spend in the store for weapons. And the weapons are quite expensive, meaning you'll have to grind a lot. It is at this point you'll start dying a couple of times. And this is where you'll notice that the checkpoints are miles, and miles apart from each other. And this isn't the only part that sucks about this. All the enemies you've killed beyond the checkpoints respawn (naturally), but your ammo does not. This means this game gets tougher and tougher the more you die, because you'll be hurting for ammo more and more. You could always try to backtrack through the level, but that mostly isn't fun, and sometimes that isn't even possible. This was probably a design oversight that works against the player, and gave me some frustrating times. But as soon as you gain enough bolts to buy the strongest weapons in the game, though, that's where the game will become a cakewalk again. When this happens to you, just grind your teeth, and push on. If I can make it through this, so can you.

THE VERDICT
If you ask me for my opinion about whether or not Ratchet & Clank was able to compete with Jak & Daxter just like Spyro could with Crash? Yes, definitely. I did like Jak & Daxter a little bit better because Jak's movements feel more fluid than Ratchet's, but where the gameplay of Jak & Daxter relies heavily on Crash Bandicoot's and Ratchet & Clank is a whole different beast in its genre entirely, it definitely deserves a candidate position as a PlayStation mascot. Ratchet & Clank may not be perfect, but it is still a blast to play!

pros:
-   large detailed environments
-   diverse weapons and weaponry
-   laugh-out-loud funny
-   Clank is just so lovable

cons:
-   inconsistent difficulty
-   Ratchet is an unlikable lead character

Very good review. I tried this one once, but the disc was damaged so I only got to play the first level. If that's any indication of the game as a whole, then I'll have to pick this one over Jak & Daxter, though I did feel that the first Jak & Daxter was a good game still.

Now to get you to review Sly Cooper for me.