Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart
- Release Date: June 11, 2021
- Developer: Insomniac Games
- Genre: Platformer
While Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart is technically the ninth game in the main series, you don’t need to have played any of the previous eight to enjoy the PS5 debut of our favorite Lombax and robot team. Clank reveals during a victory parade in the duo’s honor that he has repaired a device capable of opening portals to alternative dimensions, with Ratchet intending to use it to find other Lombaxes at some point. However, when long-term adversary, Dr. Nefarious, attacks the party, Ratchet inadvertently fires off the device, creating portals to another dimension, with all three getting caught up in the mix. You’ll also meet Rivet, a female Lombax resistance fighter, and play as both during the course of the game’s level-based campaign.
What sets Rift Apart from many other platformers at the time is how it handles its dimension-hopping gimmick. By pulling rifts toward you, you can seamlessly transition from where you were into an entirely new area, so if the place you’re in has lots of enemies firing at you, if there’s a rift to somewhere else, you can just hop in, and you’ll avoid a needless firefight.
However, taking on enemies is where the bread and butter of Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart lies, and much like the rest of the series, you also have an imaginative arsenal available to you. Some have punchy-sounding names for more conventional weapons, like the Enforcer for a shotgun, which you can control how many barrels it fires based on how far down you push the R2 trigger. There are also weirder gadgets like the Topiary Sprinkler, which deploys a turret that turns enemies into neatly cut shrubberies for a short spell. You can upgrade what they do by collecting bolts, so the aforementioned Topiary Sprinkler gains the ability to do damage over time.
One side note: if your family enjoys the latest in the Ratchet & Clank series, you can also play the 2016 remake and the PSP spinoff ‘Size Matters’ natively on your PS5. However, for the rest of the series, your best bet is to find a used PlayStation 3 and buy the HD Trilogy, alongside Deadlocked, Tools of Destruction, A Crack In Time, and Into The Nexus. There are other games in the series, but many of these are spinoffs that don’t continue the main story.
