Games Gone Feral

Quick recap of what I played through this weekend.

Ratchet and Clank Future: Tools of Destruction

The Good:

• Great level design that effectively ramps the challenge throughout the game without becoming frustrating.
• Rewarding firefights that give you the immediate gratification of bolts and bits flying out everywhere, then the deferred gratification of weapon upgrades.
• Satisfying story that reveals a nice bit of back-story that none of the other Ratchet and Clank games have revealed.

The Bad:

• I ran in to two irritating bugs. If you go about halfway through the arena rounds and then decide to leave and go to a different planet, well, the game doesn’t much like that and asserts out in a non-graceful way. The second one isn’t as easy to find, but with my luck, I found it right as I finished a difficult fight. Jumping in to corners in some geometry seems to throw you in to a hole that you can’t get out of and stops the game world from rendering anything but the skybox.
• The weapon levels didn’t seem to have as much interesting variation as in older versions. By that I mean (and this could just be bad memory), it seemed like every few levels in Deadlocked or Up Your Arsenal, you’d get a bigger spray effect, or ricocheting bullets, without having to do anything special, I didn’t notice the bigger effects until reaching max level with the weapons.

Stranglehold:

The Good:

• Lots of destruction. It felt great and never got old seeing bits and pieces of various environmental pieces flying all over the place as stray bullets hit.
• Fun John Woo esque story (if you’re in to John Woo movies to begin with).
• Did I mention blowing things up? Cuz blowing things up is great.

The Bad:

• The level design, while maintaining a nice level of pretty, ended up feeling stale towards the end. Frequently I ended up going down a very linear path while shooting everything that moved ’till I heard a gong telling me that that encounter was over.
• After the first boss fight, all (except for 1) of the boss fights felt the same. Run around an arena, shooting the boss until he’s dead, making a lap around the health packs that respawn at small time intervals.

So, that said, comparing these two games is somewhat apples to oranges, but I do think Stranglehold could have used a bit more care in designing the later levels of the game. However, unlike R&C, Stranglehold might have had it’s glitches here and there, but I never once had to restart my system because the game crashed or I hit a fatal error that I couldn’t get out of.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 16th, 2007 at 10:57 am and is filed under General, Other Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.