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Back in action
Up Your Arsenal Ratchets up the fun
BY MITCH KRPATA

Poor Ratchet just can't catch a break. He's already saved the galaxy twice, but he doesn't get any recognition. Not only that, but now his robot buddy, Clank, is famous across the cosmos for starring in a Bond knockoff called Secret Agent Clank, in which Ratchet is relegated to play Clank's bumbling chauffeur. It's a difficult existence for a young fuzzball with attitude and no evildoers to take his aggression out on. Fortunately, the arrival of the diabolical Dr. Nefarious, who plans to turn all organic life forms into robots, gives Ratchet a purpose again – which is great news for gamers.

Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal is the third in the R&C series from Sony, which have been arriving like clockwork every holiday season for the past three years. Usually this sort of assembly-line mentality that would seem to favor release dates above quality leads to uninspired – or worse, unfinished – games showing up on store shelves. Yet the Ratchet & Clank franchise started great and has only gotten better with each installment. Up Your Arsenal offers several refinements and new features, none bigger than the inclusion of online play.

Though standard deathmatching and Capture the Flag modes make for a great time, Siege mode seems to be the most popular and entertaining way to play online. Siege is a team game in which the objective is to capture and hold the enemy's base. This mode demands coordination of offensive and defensive strategies, but naturally doesn't forsake the frenetic gameplay the series is known for. The control is tight, and the frame rate stays smooth even during the most epic melees. It's incredible how well Insomniac Games has incorporated the multiplayer component into the game (there's also an offline, split-screen multiplayer option). Even if there were no single-player mode, Up Your Arsenal would still be worth picking up.

But, as their name implies, Insomniac hasn't been napping on the single-player campaign, either. By now their formula is well-established and they're sticking to it, but it takes a lot of elbow grease to make a game that provides this much fun. The crux of the advertising campaign for the series has been the menagerie of outlandish weapons Ratchet can wield, and once again our hero has an arsenal to show up anyone's. Some weapons are new, and some return from the past two games, but pretty much all of Ratchet's armaments are ridiculous. There's the Plasma Whip (a fiery melee weapon which puts anything Indiana Jones ever had to shame), the Qwack-O-Ray (which morphs enemies into ducks), and my personal favorite, the Rift Inducer, which constructs a miniature black hole that sucks up all nearby enemies.

As before, weapons gain experience the more you use them, maxing out when they get to level five (though they can become even more powerful after you beat the game once and then play in "Challenge Mode"). Not only do they gain ammo capacity and killing power, most develop gnarly new powers. The fearsome Annihilator, for example, releases bouncing mines after impact at level two, and then homing bouncing mines, and when it's fully powered it releases another flurry of missiles after initial impact. Powering up your weapons is reason alone to play all the side missions.

Oh yes, the side missions. Up Your Arsenal, while not entirely non-linear, offers branching paths and a decent measure of control over what to do next. The levels are set on different planets, and each planet offers a couple different missions. The order in which you complete them dictates which new missions become available when. Often, it's worth returning to planets from early in the game for the variety of tasks you can accomplish. There are dozens of challenges available on a TV show called Annihilation Nation, each of which pays a handsome amount of bolts (bolts, once again, being the galactic currency that you can use to buy new weapons and armor).

The variety of side missions available makes this a crazily addictive game. There are obstacle courses and gauntlet battles, some that last 10 minutes or more. Throughout the game Ratchet acquires Captain Qwark "vid-comics," which are video games featuring the bungling Qwark. These play out as traditional side-scrolling platformers, with gameplay reminiscent of the original 2D Duke Nukem PC games. You can also hunt through the sewers for "Sewer Crystals," which as best as I could figure were poops belonging to giant slime creatures. (Hey, whatever – there's a guy willing to buy 'em from you at 2000 bolts a pop.)

Hang on, I'm still not done. As before, you can hack through security doors using a graphical interface. This time, the hacker resembles nothing so much as the classic Atari shooter Tempest. You know a series is great when even opening doors is fun.

Best of all, Up Your Arsenal offers real, honest-to-God humor throughout the game. From Ratchet's robotic soldier buddies who speak entirely in war movie clichés ("Stay frosty, people!") to stoner Skid's dialogue after Nefarious turns him into a robot ("Destroy all squishies… and stuff"), it's one clever gag after another. Even when the jokes delve ever so slightly into crudeness (such as when Ratchet, while delivering a eulogy, describes Qwark's chin as looking "like a butt"), it's always so good-natured you can't help but grin. And a plot twist reminiscent of the classic Star Trek episode featuring the Enterprise crew's mustachioed doppelgängers is expertly done.

The action is as fast and as furious as ever – some screen-filling battles are so graphically intensive that I can't believe the frame rate never drops – but that should be no surprise. But considering how dramatically the Ratchet & Clank series continues to improve, especially by adding a sweet online experience, I don't know what to say about Up Your Arsenal except for "Bravo!"

Score: 9.5 (out of 10)


Issue Date: December 17 - 23, 2004
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