Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart

Review game Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, Gorgeous and endearing, Rift Apart is a supremely likable adventure and a solid port-but at this price

This bright action-adventure game is the perfect example of a console-only game. It will come out for the PlayStation 5 in 2021. It takes a popular pair of Sony mascots and sends them on a journey to show off the hardware’s features, especially its fast-loading SSD. The story is all about moving smoothly between different universes, which is a feature of the hardware. All of these things make it a little strange to be reviewing on a PC in the year 2023.

What is it? A former PS5 exclusive action-adventure game about multiversal chaos in an alien galaxy.
Release date: July 26, 2023
Expect to pay £50 or $60.
Developer: Insomniac Games, Nixxes Software
Publisher: PlayStation PC LLC
Reviewed on: AMD Ryzen 9 5900X, 32GB RAM, Nvidia Geforce RTX 3080
Steam Deck: Verified

Let’s start with the easy things. Even if you’ve never played a Ratchet & Clank game before—which, if you only play PC games, you almost certainly haven’t—Rift Apart is a good place to start. Ratchet, a furry alien space hero, and Clank, a robot sidekick, try to solve an interdimensional crisis caused by one of their old enemies. The game is set in a bright, cartoony sci-fi galaxy. Even though there’s a lot of history here, with lots of references for long-time fans and the pair almost acting like retired veterans after their many adventures in the series’ 20 years of games, it’s all easy enough to understand. Clank wants to help Ratchet find his lost people, but Ratchet isn’t sure about it. They both want to save the universe, though, so it’s not a big deal.

This interdimensional crisis is a good reason for yet another story that jumps from one universe to another and for the introduction of Rivet and Kit. These two are basically female versions of the main characters. They are fully realised and interesting on their own, and as brand-new heroes, they make it even easier for new players to get into the game. As the story goes on, you switch between playing Ratchet and Rivet. They both have the same skills and equipment, but they see the world in very different ways.

The action is straight out of a movie. Between the third-person shooting and light platforming, there are big set pieces, boss fights, and lovingly made cutscenes. There is also some exploring and puzzle-solving to keep things interesting. It’s rarely hard to follow, but it’s never boring, and none of its ideas get old over the course of its 10–15-hour runtime.

Let’s talk about the big problem: In recent years, Sony’s interest in PC seems to have grown with a series of high-profile ports of its older games, but it hasn’t been all smooth sailing. The PC version of The Last of Us was so bad that we had to give one of the best-reviewed console games ever a 50% review score. Rift Apart is not a repeat of that disaster, which is good news.

With my RTX 3080 graphics card and AMD Ryzen 9 5900X processor, the game runs at max settings with a smooth 60 FPS or more most of the time. Only in a few places with a lot of people does it drop to around 45 FPS. Sequences where you quickly switch between dimensions, which were meant to show how much faster the PS5’s SSD is than the PS4’s hard drive, have a few loading pauses that I’ve noticed, but nothing long enough to ruin the show. Even though you can move quickly between levels and planets, there isn’t much noticeable loading time in the game as a whole. Even when I switched my installation from an SSD to a hard drive, I didn’t notice much difference in how fast it loaded or ran.

You can change a lot of the graphics and display settings to your liking, such as the field of view (FOV) slider and the weather effects. You can even choose how the game handles upscaling. There are a lot of control options that let you change how the game feels, and there are settings for speed runners that let you get rid of certain pauses and slow-mo parts to save time. It’s a solid port with all the features you’d expect from one of the biggest game companies in the world.

Even though it doesn’t work as well as it did on the PS5, Rift Apart is still a great way to test your hardware. Visual spectacle is the game’s strongest point. It combines technical wizardry with a beautiful, colourful art style to make scenes and vistas that are still impressive even though they are two years old. There are a lot of particle effects, and the backgrounds are always busy. You can jump from a cyberpunk city to a stormy pirate ship in a matter of seconds, and the cutscenes are as good as those in many blockbuster animated movies.

It’s great at both the big picture and the small stuff. Huge robots and towering dinosaurs crash into scenes all the time, but the characters’ subtle movements and facial expressions are drawn with great care. Even though the story isn’t very deep emotionally, you’ll find yourself caring about the main characters a lot more than you ever thought you would for an alien with a furry face or a robot the size of a lunchbox.

The way mental health issues are dealt with in Rift Apart is surprisingly well done.

That doesn’t mean that the headlining duo gets a bad deal in space. Ratchet’s internal struggle over whether he really wants to find the rest of his cat-like lombax race is a big part of the story, and Clank’s sense of self-worth in the face of an injury is moving. All of the characters in Rift Apart deal with mental health issues in surprising ways that feel real and deep. All of this is wrapped up in a fun, bright, and bubbly adventure.

We’ve gotten hints and teases about the existence of other dimensions before, with the Dimensionator serving as a cliffhanger in 2013’s Ratchet and Clank: Into the Nexus. But Rift Apart makes good on the multiverse idea in hilarious, charming, and even surprisingly touching ways. Sometimes it’s done for laughs, like with alternate-reality versions of existing characters, and sometimes it’s done in a clever way for the game’s mechanics, like when Ratchet or Rivet jump between two versions of the same planet to find that paths that were closed in one version are open in the other version, but there’s more danger waiting for them there.

The story is told world by world in Rift Apart. This is a standard format for the Ratchet and Clank games, but a lot of work went into making each planet different, with its own story and structure. Each world’s story, dialogue, and encounters fit the personality of the lombax you’re controlling there. For example, the furballs you’ll meet in Sargasso as Rivet are all named Mort and speak with a friendly American midwest tone and accent, while Zurkie’s is a pub and battleground where travellers like Rivet can meet and fight. Later planets use the idea of the multiverse in some surprising and genre-hopping ways. One of these uses a lot of the games that Insomniac has made since we last saw Ratchet and is done better than when Naughty Dog tried to do something similar with Uncharted. Each world also has a side quest that isn’t part of the main story. This adds a bit more colour to the world and usually makes the platforming sections more interesting.

On later planets, the idea of the “multiverse” is used in some surprising ways that jump from one genre to another.

Due to the different worlds you’ll visit, the impressive level of detail stays surprising thanks to the art direction as a whole. Yes, some of the interiors will have the same metallic, futuristic feel, and surfaces that are important to the game, like places for your gravity boots to stick, will be repeated so that they are always easy to spot. But each world has its own look, which is fun to discover. They all have different colours, landscapes, and groups of memorable characters.

Wheel of Strange Weapons

Fans who have played the game before can also find new things to do in each moment. Since the 2016 reboot on PS4, Ratchet and Rivet’s movement has been fine-tuned, and small changes like a beautifully animated dash move and being able to run up walls make a huge difference. It not only lets the platforming sections be trickier and more complicated and lets you put collectibles in different places, but it also gives the combat more depth. The lombaxes can dodge attacks by phasing through them, and timing a dash just right to get close and do a lot of damage is always a thrill.

Ratchet can do melee damage with his wrench, and Rivet can do the same with her hammer. However, because battles are bigger in Rift Apart than they were in previous games, I’ve used Ratchet’s standard weapon a lot less than I did before. In Rift Apart, you have to be smarter about how you use the weird weapons, and the rifts help you both in battles and when you’re looking for things to collect. They are placed in most battle arenas in a way that makes it easy for Ratchet to get to higher ground or cross the battlefield.

They have helped me more times than I’d like to admit. It’s a lot like jumping through a portal in Portal, but the on-screen effect of the new location hurtling towards you and the haptic feedback from the DualSense give the mechanic its own style and give combat more tactical options than it’s ever had before in the series. It’s always cool to jump across the battlefield and leave your enemies confused or surprised by your sudden appearance, giving you a brief advantage. The best times to use them are when there’s a lot going on, like when you’re being chased or fighting a boss and you’re being thrown from planet to planet by rifts. It’s especially funny to find a later world and realise that you saw it briefly while dodging a huge robot’s fists.

From a different place

Working through everything Rift Apart has to offer is a slow but rewarding process. There’s no enemy that’s so hard to beat or collectible that’s so hard to find, and there’s enough mechanical and visual variety to keep you from getting bored. It’s a great way to spend a weekend watching films and getting things done in a fun way.

The problem is that it only took me about 15 hours to finish the main story, get all of the collectibles, do all of the side quests, and fully upgrade every gun. If you just follow the critical path, it will take less than 10 hours. There is a new game+ mode with more levels of weapon upgrades to get, but even though I liked playing Rift Apart, it doesn’t have enough depth to make me want to play it again right away.

In games, brevity isn’t always a bad thing, but it’s hard to avoid the feeling that Rift Apart is a showcase for consoles and feels much less important on PC. Even though it came out six months after the PS5, it has all the signs of a launch game. Launch games are made to show what the hardware can do when there aren’t many other options. It looks great and is fun to watch—you’d have to be a pretty grumpy person not to enjoy the colourful galaxy—but there’s not much to it. At £50 or $60, it’s hard to ignore the fact that you could spend that money on bigger, meatier experiences on PC.