Partridge Senpai's 2020 Beaten Games:Previously:
2016 2017 2018 2019* indicates a repeat
1-5051.
Ratchet & Clank 2: Going Commando (PS2)
52.
Ratchet & Clank 3: Up Your Arsenal (PS2)
53.
Nier: Automata (PS4)
54. Ratchet: Deadlocked (PS2)
My Ratchet & Clank kinda-marathon continues with the first game I've actually bought off of Yahoo Auctions! I'd heard this title was a bit weird among R&C games and divisive among fans, and those impressions are what I walked away from it with as well. It took me a little under 8 hours (and an hour of that was grinding for the final boss) to beat the Japanese version of the game.
Ratchet: Deadlocked pics up where 3 left off, with Ratchet & Clank a part of Q-Force, when they're suddenly kidnapped by an intergalactic TV producer for Vox entertainment. He wants them to compete in his death battles among heroes, and Ratchet goes on a mission to both compete for his life and try and find a way to shut down Vox once and for all. That's right, just Ratchet. There's a reason Clank isn't even in the English title for the game, and that's because he's barely in it, and he never fights with you. Clank is your radio operator, effectively, telling you mission instructions which I never got most of because this game has virtually no subtitles (for some reason when the last two games got subtitles perfect), and the objectives are often self-explanatory enough that it didn't matter (expect for the times when they weren't very self-explanatory XP). Compared to even Ratchet & Clank 1, this game is pretty darn light on story, and feels almost unfinished in that regard. Apparently they were going for something a little more serious/edgy to compete with things like Halo that were getting popular at the time, but that was a serious swing and a miss here.
The gameplay of this entry is also really different from the previous games. It's more like if they made an entire game around the arena missions and ranger missions from the past two games. The game has a small hub area in the Vox station, but outside of that it's almost entirely menus picking different missions from menus that are usually vehicle trials, combat trials, or small platforming missions with lots of combat. All the platforming and paying for upgrades forward from previous games is totally gone, and there are a lot less overall weapons in this game as well.
A lot of the weapons are also just not very fun or just boring, and that hour of grinding I needed to do at the end of the game was to get the rocket launcher and a few other guns to a level good enough that I could use them to beat the final boss with. The default rifle-esque gun you start the game with is so good and upgrades so well, I just used that for almost the entire game. You have a couple of "battle bots" that flank you and will attack targets around you, but you have very limited control over them, they're sorta ham-fisted solutions for puzzles quite often (which just amounts to pressing a button on the D-pad to order them to do the thing), and they don't add much to the game at all. They seem more like a concession that there's too often too much going on to really pay attention to, so they're there to keep you from getting totally ganked by something outside of your line of sight (since you can die REALLY fast in this game if you aren't careful).
This game overall feels like a real step back in the gameplay department from the design to the mechanics themselves. Ratchet feels noticeably stiffer to move than in R&C3, and a bit slower too. And despite that, this game still has some pretty severe framerate issues. The vehicle sections are also absolutely dire to control and are all awful. That is especially weird after R&C3 had great vehicle sections, but this game manages to make everything past games' vehicle sections have done well worse in just about every regard. The one gold star I can award to this game is that they have finally gotten the auto-aim down right. It works great and it makes combat way way easier.
Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. Some people really do like the arena challenges in this game, and the game for the most part does play quite well, particularly in the combat sections, so I can't give it an outright "not recommended". That said, I think this is an even more skip-worthy entry than the first Ratchet & Clank, and most people would be better served these days just skipping right from R&C3 to R&C Future 1, because story-wise and mechanically you are barely missing anything with Ratchet: Deadlocked. This game's existence just seems to imply that Insomniac had no idea what made the first 3 games popular, or were just so self conscious about continuing to do what had worked so well that they made this weird footnote of a mainline R&C game.
I identify everyone via avatar, so if you change your avatar, I genuinely might completely forget who you are. -- Me