Review

Ratchet & Clank: Size Matters

I was excited for Ratchet & Clank: Size Matters. I thought Sony was crazy, but I was excited. I have learned my lesson. Now I just think Sony is crazy. One has to question Sony’s motives of releasing these PSP to PS2 ports. On the one hand you have the excited poor people (i.e. me) who have not purchased a PSP and were missing out on potentially awesome games. While, on the other hand, you’ll likely have a lot of PSP owners/fanboys that are really, really pissed. I mean, the PS2 is getting the same game while being about ten bucks cheaper.

What does Sony stand to gain with this? I have to assume they are losing PSP sales if they port away many of the reasons for buying one. I can understand bringing the popular games to a wider consumer base, but what about the other PSP games? Will they just collect dust? Will this impact the developers of future PSP games?

The world may never know…

I’m not a hardcore follower of the Ratchet and Clank series but I have played through a few of them. And I can tell you that this game does not play like a Ratchet game should. After I was thrown into the game the first thing that presented itself was the wonky camera. It’s zeroed down on Ratchet’s back most of the time. You get a great view of the character, but not much of everything else. It got to the point where I was physically tilting my head upwards to try and get a better view of my surroundings. Personally, I’d like to see the platforms I’m supposed to be platforming on. Likewise with the enemies I’m trying to destroy. It’s especially aggravating when there are several enemies to confront in close quarters. All of the particles and bodies running around create a blurry explosion of visuals. This fireworks display clogs up the screen and makes it hard to tell what’s actually going on. Dodging is particularly a problem in these instances.

I know this seems like an odd complaint, but it kept reiterating itself to the point that I couldn’t ignore it: the enemies just don’t die like they should. This is probably a clever ploy to squeeze more gameplay out of an already short game. I, for example, expect an enemy to be killed within a few short seconds of being bombarded with my fully-leveled, double barreled, dual wielded Lacerators. Instead, it takes at least 15 slow shots to kill a single enemy. Add the time it takes to jump around and dodge its attacks then multiply that by the amount of enemies in the room. It ends up taking a long time. This sort of tedium is not fun. The other Ratchet games don’t have this problem and heartily I salute them for it.

If you add both of the above problems together you end up dying a lot. This wouldn’t be so bad except for the fact that the continue points are too far apart. So, you often end up having to start over at the beginning of a level with all of the enemies back with a vengeance. Thankfully, the force field item is a great combatant of this. Too bad you’ll have to wait until most of the game is over to be able to purchase it. I’m aware that some people might not find a rational complaint in “the enemies don’t die fast enough”. They are probably the types who like annoyingly challenging games. Good for you if you fit under this category. You might like this game.

The upgradeable weapons are ever present; one of the redeeming qualities of this title. New to me (not to those of you who played the PSP version) are the armor pieces. These are nifty because you get to equip say, a helmet once you’ve found it, to give you an armor-rating boost. This, in turn, helps you die less. I found it odd that these armor pieces were laying around on the ground and just happened to be Ratchet’s size. We’re not in the 90’s anymore, people.

There is something big that seems to be lacking from this title – platforming, though this is probably for the better (with the lame camera and all). Sure, you’ll run into a bit of it here and there but, for the most part, you just go from room to room shooting down enemies.

You know how some games add a racing or flying vehicle part to spice up the gameplay? Size Matters includes both. Alas, the spices are bland. The StarFox-esque space shooter parts are pretty decent. Even if I don’t know how the opposing ships fit into the story. It also seems to be a fruitless effort to try and avoid every obstacle that’s thrown at you during a run. The hover board racing, however, is not fun. These instances consist of taking on long, complicated tracks at top speeds of 10 mph. You heard me, ten. I seriously slid from side to side faster than I accelerated. Your opponents thankfully go slower than you do, but this is not much of a respite when you are continuously falling off of ledges because you can’t get the sensitivity of the steering right. Either that or you’ve gone and hit a solid object and exploded. How you can be vaporized by something at those low speeds is beyond me.

I should probably take some time to describe the story. It is short…and broken. It definitely has a problem meshing with the gameplay. I still got a few good chuckles out of it. But, being unremarkable and clocking in at a length of only about 5 hours, I doubt I’ll be able to remember any of it by next Tuesday. It didn’t introduce any new interesting characters, either; a staple of the Ratchet series. The villain was boring and fit the usual “bent on taking over universe” or “intent on destroying the universe” archetype – I can’t remember which. Maybe it was both. The one saving grace of the story is that all of the character’s original voices are present.

For those of you looking forward to four-player multi-tap fun, think again. The multiplayer comes in two-player split screen only. It is objective based and about as fun as grinding up meat – which happens to be one of the objectives. In this map, cleverly (sarcasm) named Moon Cow Disease, you and your opponent race towards a field to collect cows, bring them to a grinder, and take the meat-filled boxes to a truck to be delivered. Whoever gets enough boxes first, wins. If Size Matters supported four players this might end up being fun. As it is, it’s just a dogfight that goes nowhere. Every time one player successfully makes a box of meat, the opponent just kills him and claims it. Then the fallen player spawns and kills the opponent with the box and grabs it. Things go like this in an endless circle until both give up and play Brawl. The other multiplayer maps aren’t much better. With only two players there’s just not much fun to be had.

The PSP version of Size Matters got high scores from many different sources. This could be attributed to the different expectations we have of handheld versus console games. But it was my impression that the PSP’s games were supposed to bridge that gap. Maybe it had better multiplayer or came during a game “drought” where people were desperate for anything. Call me insane, but I just can’t add all of this game up and make it equal an 8 or 9. Maybe this is just a horrible, horrible port.