This April, two of PlayStation’s biggest heroes will unleash a double-barrelled assault on fans across the globe: hitting cinemas with their feature film debut, and crashing onto PS4 for the first time in a full remake of their PS2 platforming classic. Matthew Pellett dives into the game and movie to see if Ratchet & Clank can thrive in a new generation.
To fully grasp how splendidly the new Ratchet & Clank game is shaping up, first you need to ignore its RRP. With a budget price set at £29.99, expectations are likely moderate. Perhaps you think this is a simple remaster of the first game in the series: the same blueprints as the 2002 platformer-cum-shooter starring a wannabe hero lombax named Ratchet and his newfound robot friend Clank. This time with some uprezzed textures and a handful of minor feature tweaks for good measure, maybe? Enough to justify a new disc rather than just releasing the emulated PS2 original, of course, just not the overhaul to warrant a full-price £50 release.
What you certainly wouldn’t expect is an all-new adventure that, were it not for its iconic duo’s unmistakable silhouettes, would be completely unrecognisable from the original. You wouldn’t anticipate this being one of the most jaw-droppingly, eye-poppingly gorgeous games to ever hit PS4. You certainly wouldn’t think that every level has been completely redesigned, with entirely new sections added until stages end up being multiple times bigger than their original counterparts. Or that there are going to be three completely new planets waiting for you – ones that never even featured in the first game.
Yet as we sit down and play the remake for a few hours, it becomes exceedingly clear that Ratchet & Clank is far bigger and far grander than anybody imagined. Series creator Insomniac Games has secretly been making one of the most exciting PlayStation 4 games on the horizon, and just two months out from its release, nobody’s realised it.
BOLTS FROM THE BLUE
In a straight head-to-head with the original title, two levels leap out to exemplify how far Ratchet & Clank has progressed in just two console generations. The first is Gaspar. The small lava planet played a minor part in 2002’s adventure, but for its return, Insomniac looked through the series’ later games to reinvent how it unfolds.
“The jetpack from (Into The) Nexus was one of my favourite features,” says Insomniac’s community lead James Stevenson. “The parts of Gaspar from the PS2 game actually haven’t changed a lot from some of the key things that you’ll remember, but now there’s this whole extra section – probably two or three times the size of the original area – where you get the jetpack and fly around, hunting giant beasts and collecting their brains. That whole section is completely new.”
And it’s massive. With scores of brains to extract and slip into Ratchet’s pockets, you won’t just rattle through these fiery hunting grounds in a couple of minutes. Bringing the jetpack backwards in time and into the first game introduces a new sense of verticality, previously absent – you’ve only got the kit in certain areas, but you’ll have the freedom to explore in all directions once you’re airborne.
The second key level? That would be Metropolis, nestled high in the clouds of Kerwan. Home to a scene every bit as action-packed as the iconic Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade opening, it sees Ratchet haring along the traincars of a locomotive as it speeds through Aleero City. Our hero now shimmies along the sides of giant fishtanks, swingshots out over the edge of the track to bypass obstacles, and smacks enemies off the vehicle with his trusty wrench.
“The train depot in the original game was, like, five platforms with basically nothing on them and the enemies could barely move,” reminisces Stevenson. “Now it’s this huge set-piece with probably 25 to 30 traincars, and there are explosive moments and animal cars and a car carrying spaceships…
“It’s way bigger. I guess it’s how you would have imagined it when you were playing the PS2 game. Like, ‘This is what it feels like in your head’. But now, you can actually see it fully realised as we would have originally wanted it to feel.”
WRENCH WARFARE
While planets such as Pokitaru remain truer to the original game’s topography, PS4’s power ensures they’re equally capable of wowing us. Returning players may recall the tropical world’s Jowai Resort is under threat as the enemy Blarg forces dump toxic waste onto the surface. In the remake, Chairman Drek (or should that be Ultimate Supreme Executive Chairman Drek? We lose track…) has sent his armies to drain the world dry, slowly turning the landscape from a Hawaiian-esque paradise into a desert more befitting Arrakis from sci-fi classic Dune.
As giant, serpent-like hydroharvester vehicles made up of spherical water containers snake their way through the sky and begin vacuuming up the seas, it’s tempting to keep stopping and panning the camera to soak it all in. Not that there’s much time to do so: Ratchet & Clank’s levels are flooded with enemies – far more than we recall battling at any one time in 2002.
Luckily, Insomniac’s giving us the tools to cope with the newer enemy types and increased numbers. As well as the ability to strafe and shoot, our new arsenal contains our favourite guns from the entire series. The Predator Launcher, Fusion Bomb, Buzz Blades, Mr Zurkon… if you loved a weapon from any point in the franchise, there’s a very good chance it’s found its way into the remake.
“One of my favourite weapons of all is the Groovitron,” says Insomniac president Ted Price of the disco ball that makes enemies break out into uncontrollable dancing. “There are a lot of enemies throughout the game, and every time you throw out a Groovitron it’s a discovery experience where you find out what the animators decided to do with these enemies to make them particularly goofy.”
The new Pixelizer weapon boasts a similar appeal. “It works on every single enemy, from bosses to standard and tiny enemies,” says Stevenson. “Everything will get pixelised, so you’ll want to try over and over to see what pixel versions of enemies look like.” It doesn’t just turn your foes into 8-bit baddies, either – it turns their bodies into voxels. Switch to Ratchet’s wrench and you can smash the pieces apart, dismantling enemies with ease.
“It’s something we’ve wanted to do for a while, but we’ve never had the horsepower to do it until the PS4,” Stevenson admits. “It’s funny how much horsepower you need to make that weapon work – to make something relatively lo-res.” Weapons are all upgradable, too.
Whether it’s the new arc-lightningfiring Proton Drum or the ol’ faithful Pyrocitor, snatching up Raretarium Shards enables you to upgrade damage, ammo capacity and so on. Unlock enough on each tool and you’ll activate bonus special abilities, so it really pays to root out all of the collectibles.
THE QWARK KNIGHT RISES
“We’re actually at the point where we get people who have grown up with Ratchet and now play it with their kids,” Stevenson says. “There’s this second generation of Ratchet fans, which we think is super-cool because not many franchises get to that point. They’re going to take their kids to see the movie and then come home and play the game – it could be a really, really fun thing for families who grew up on Ratchet & Clank.”
Yes, the duo’s comeback isn’t just limited to our PlayStation 4s – it’ll also be hitting cinemas in late April here in the UK, the same week as the game’s release. Produced by Rainmaker Entertainment and Blockade Entertainment, it’s directed by ex-game developer Kevin Munroe, and features a script penned by former Insomniac writer TJ Fixman – writer of the Ratchet & Clank Future series on PlayStation 3.
To keep things varied and ensure the new movie and game aren’t just straight copy-and-pastes of one another, Insomniac, Blockade and Rainmaker have a cunning plan. While the film is technically a retelling of the first game from 2002, the new game is based on the new movie… only it’s being told from Captain Qwark’s viewpoint. The twist means it’ll be a little bit of a skewed version of events – a Chinese whisper tale, of sorts, no doubt massaged to further feed the Galactic Ranger’s swelling ego.
The principal game voice actors are back, of course, but outside of the main duo, there are huge surprises. Serious, award-winning talent is involved with the film, including Sly Stallone, Rosario Dawson, John Goodman and Paul Giamatti.
CHILDREN OF THE POPCORN
In December 2014, we travelled to Los Angeles for an early peek at the movie in production, sitting in on Armin Shimerman’s voice recording session. We watched in growing awe as the Star Trek and Buffy actor reprised his role as Dr Nefarious, acing almost all of his lines in one or two takes in a single morning session ahead of David ‘Clank’ Kaye’s afternoon in the booth.
Although production wrapped up last April (originally pegged for a 2015 release, the film’s release was held back to coincide with the game, which needed extra development time), back in 2014, some of the animation had yet to be finished. For the most part, during our visit, placeholder ‘scratch’ audio was piped into the booth from which Shimerman could take his cues, allowing him to deliver lines in time with the video. A four-strong team manipulated the recordings on the fly, ensuring takes matched the animated lip movements by quickly tweaking the audio speeds when needed.
If timings were slightly off, the crew could alert Shimerman to speed up or slow down certain enunciations, though during the entire session the most requests for another pass came from the actor himself, who insisted he could improve upon lines that sounded perfect to our untrained ears. When it came to the unfinished parts of the movie, Shimerman’s recorded lines were to be supplied direct to the animators, who could then synchronise his lips perfectly with the final audio.
Seeing an animated movie in piecemeal, partially rendered chunks isn’t ideal, yet even just fragments of scenes betrayed the humour on show. The movie’s shaping up to be seriously funny, and the ‘two underdog outcasts meet and set out to become unlikely heroes’ plot is a universal theme that should appeal to anyone, regardless of their knowledge of the game.
NEXUS GENERATION
It’s been two-and-a-half years since a certain lombax and his Zoni robot pal starred in Ratchet & Clank: Nexus – the longest period of dormancy for the series since its inception in 2002. But the time away from the spotlight has done Ratchet & Clank wonders, and the decision to shape the duo’s future by reaching into their past looks to be an inspired one. So does this rebooted entertainment pairing of game and film signal an intent to press the reset button on the franchise, and to use this as a launchpad for the future?
“We’ll see,” says Ted Price. “We always hope that we have another opportunity to continue Ratchet’s adventures. It really depends on the fan feedback.”
If that’s what it comes down to, it’s hard to see this as anything but a success-in-waiting. However, releasing on 20 April – eight days after Dark Souls III and nine days before Uncharted 4, its launch window’s worringly crowded. Ratchet & Clank’s quality is clear; let’s hope the price, the nostalgia factor and the movie momentum can help Insomniac’s icons gain the fans they deserve.