Insomniac managed to trim this down to the essentials, making it feel like just the right amount of Ratchet. But when it wrapped up, I felt fully satisfied. They're never terribly taxing on the brain, but they're brief and sparse enough to serve as little breaks in the action without becoming too distracting.Īll this abbreviation means the game is significantly shorter than you might expect from a Ratchet adventure, only 5-6 hours. Its traditional tropes are occasionally broken up by brief puzzle segments as Clank, steering through dimensional rifts only to smack a nether creature to wake him up and draw him back to its entrance.

The chief threat in this game is actually caused by an artifact from a past game, so long-term fans will be rewarded with a little bit of extra insight. I've never cared enough to commit the myriad villains to memory, but the references to past games does make for some sense of cohesiveness. The story is once again a sweet-natured (if forgettable) space adventure, with nods to various points of continuity in the series. Zurkon, who now sports an entire Zurkon family when fully upgraded. I enjoyed the twists on favorite weapons too, like Mr. Leveling them upgrades strength, but the gear is also complemented by a grid-based upgrade system that grants special new abilities or increases drop rates.

They level up much quicker, and have fewer upgrades that are each more substantial.

The weapons-always a standout feature of Ratchet games-have been given a slimming down as well. The various worlds introduce new mechanics at a steady clip, but move along from one setting to the next quickly enough to maintain a sense of visual variety. There's very little in the way of tutorial segments, apparently assuming that most people interested have played a Ratchet game before. Everything has been streamlined to make Nexus hit the ground running. Most importantly, this is a very abbreviated Ratchet experience. But a few smart moves keep it from feeling redundant and makes for a finely-tuned distillation of everything that made the series so engaging and worthy of its longevity.

As a result, it hews closely to the formula first forged in the PlayStation 2 era. Ratchet & Clank: Into the Nexus finally returns to the series' roots.

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