You’d be excused for having overlooked Ratchet & Clank 3. The franchise has been set to automatic since its inception, with a new game being pumped out once every 12 months – the kind of prolific visibility that can make a series all too easy to ignore. And, from a distance, it seems to sit happily alongside any number of other Star & Sidekick games out there, slightly in the shadow of the Jak And Daxter games or as one-third of Sony’s first-party club of cartoon mascots that was completed by Sly Raccoon. Each of the three seemed for a while to be vying for the position of format figurehead, an accolade was never quite to be after Grand Theft Auto III turned up and jacked that particular throne. And a lack of enthusiasm is understandable when it’s a series fronted by a squat, furry hero with ink-blot eyes and a puppy nose, especially since Insomniac seemed determined to run it into the ground. But, in practice, it was only for the sake of turning it into fertiliser, to harvest a richer crop of of the series’ potential, as proved by Ratchet & Clank 3 – the game which best demonstrates the series’ unique nature.



It’s often been categorised as a platformer – a status that veers close to some kind of dismissal for a 3D game these days – but feels little of the sort in motion. Granted, it has been visited by the ghost of the Super Mario 64 clone; high, glideand double jumps across moving platforms, hookshot swings, and battle bubbles broken up by environmental navigation. But those cobwebs are swiftly swept away – or rather, blown away – when its arsenal of weapons snaps into life with an unexpected, and utterly distinctive, brutality. It’s not as if Ratchet & Clank 3’s card-carrying action credentials require hours of play to bring out any subtlety. Your combat strategy is pure shock and awe, your biggest tactic excess; who needs precision when the Shock Blaster shotgun turns the whole screen into your crosshair? During combat, a liberating overkill of powers and ballistics can be stacked: deploy a Tesla Barrier to surround Ratchet, throw down Holoshields, activate the Agents of Doom drones (eventually upgrading to Agents of Death, with heat-seeking rockets, jetpacks and nuclear kamikaze capability) and toss out some Mini Turrets – all of this is possible before any triggers have been squeezed.



To call them guns is simply too small a word; these are weapons of mass satisfaction, horrendous sci-fi handcannons that were given pride of place in the series’ advertising campaigns. And off you go: throw in
a few Infector rounds to turn enemies on one another. Or use the Qwack-O-Ray to turn them into suicide bomber pets. Or maybe send in a Bouncer round – a spiked mine that explodes into a Bravia advert of smaller, sticky grenades for a fountain of carnage. Or use the Rift Inducer to open up a series of electrified black holes. Or douse the fracas in a wiggly spray of searing lava. Or steam straight in flailing your Plasma Whip, a giant’s shoelace of a melee weapon with a libellous range. Or, or, or... and on and on and on. Once the ammo of your favourite weapon is spent, there’s no shortage of glee or ease in switching to the next and continuing the hi-tech bombardment. And each one upgrades through five classes of escalating devastation, too, with further black-market Acid and Shock mods optional, just in case you can still see any part of the screen before the smoke and sparkles have cleared.