Today we’re not just talking about one game, but three – and somehow an entire series. “Ratchet and Clank” is a classic on the Playstation that has lasted for decades. So far I’ve only had the pleasure on the PSP, so it was time to catch up on the first three parts. You can read here whether it was worth it.

As mentioned, my first encounter with Ratchet and Clank was on the PSP – Secret Agent Clank was one of the first games I played on handheld and I really enjoyed it. At that point I didn’t even know that the part with Clank as the protagonist was rather an exception – I only found out about that later through “Size Matters”.

I recommend these two games to anyone looking to get back into the PSP; I still had to catch up on the “real” parts on the Playstation 2 or 3 though. We played the first part directly on the PS2, the other two on the PS4 via cloud gaming (at this point it should not be about the peculiarities of cloud gaming, I will write something about that separately).

All three parts can actually be described with the same words: action platformer. We jump, run and shoot our way through different levels, solve smaller puzzles, for example in the form of door locks that have to be picked, and work towards a specific goal: to save the galaxy.

If you can’t blame the games for one thing, it’s creativity in storytelling. We start with a threat to the galaxy, Ratchet and Clank become (more or less willingly) the heroes who must fight this threat, they get separated at some point, they come together again, the good guys win, the bad guys lose – so far, as usual.

As negative as that may sound, I didn’t find it bad at all. The games make up for the rather mediocre basic story with their good sense of humor. This is often quite flat, but there are also quite complex social criticisms at one point or another. There are some moments that seem pretty simplistic at first glance, but when you take a closer look, they have quite a deep meaning – I like that a lot.

Overall, however, you shouldn’t expect a narrative masterpiece: the biggest part is shooting around. In the course of the game you collect more and more unusual weapons and level them up in order to fight increasingly stronger opponents. Finally comes the obligatory boss fight, you win, everyone is happy.

This works quite well over one game, and it also entertained me well in the three parts that I played in a row, which all follow this principle. Originally, however, I also wanted to play the following parts directly – I deviated from the plan. It gets quite monotonous in such a short time, and the elements added in each subsequent part can’t change this monotony much – I just don’t have the waiting time here that prepares me again for such a game.

The technical side of the games can be dealt with very quickly: it went well. We had no bugs, the games looked good (for their respective ages) and we didn’t have any crashes or anything like that. Game-mechanically everything worked very well, only the first part had a few weaknesses in one place or another. However, these were due to a lack of understanding or tutorials that were too short, the successors did not have this problem.

So, what is my take on this series? I like the games. They’re not particularly complex, you can challenge your skills at one point or another and spend a relaxing couple of afternoons with them – they’re perfect for that. They were therefore also well suited for streaming. No matter when you tuned in, you knew what to do (shoot) and you knew the essential aspects of the story (save the galaxy). I really enjoyed playing it, I’ll just wait a bit until the next part – a bit more demanding games in between provide the necessary variety.

How have you found the series so far? Are you looking forward to the next parts? Have you played Ratchet and Clank yourself? Feel free to join the discussion on Discord!