If you're unfamiliar with the series, Tools is as good a place as any to start. It's a humourous space-age adventure that mixes shooting, platforming, shooting, flying, shooting and puzzles. Did we mention the shooting? Insomniac's philosophy is that making games ought to be fun, and it definitely shows. Tools gives you starting weapons that would be BFGs in most other games, and the arsenal lacks none of the trademark ludicrousness-bordering-on-insanity that we've come to expect from the series. There's so much to do in this game, and none of it feels cheaply tacked on, nor have the developers overused any one element, despite how tempting it must have been to pack the game to death with everything.
Having said that this game is as good as any to start the series, it in fact rather seems as though Insomniac expected many gamers to enter at this point, as many elements jar with previous games quite disconcertingly. We learn that Ratchet is an orphan and the last of his species, and he knows nothing of his parentage or of his past. No allusion was made to any of this in past games, and it's rather hard to swallow this as having been the truth all along.
Instead of having to save a galaxy, Ratchet now has to save the entire universe from the grip of Percival Tachyon, the despotic Cragmite Emperor. The Cragmites and the Lombaxes (Ratchet's people) nearly wiped each other out in the Great War, and now Tachyon wants to finish his side's job, and rule the universe with his legions of trigger-happy fish. Yep, Frank Zappa was right ("Beware the fish people, they are the true enemy"). They walk around on land in formidable robot suits, until you gun them down, leaving them bereft of their machinated exoskeletons and powerless to do anything but flop around on the floor and squeak. It's almost enough to make you feel bad about killing them. Only almost - stamping on a bug-eyed fish and watching it go squish is just too funny.
Though the game centres on raining plasma onto hordes of robots and savage beasts, it isn't a non-stop killfest. There are sections in which you control Ratchet's sidekick Clank, which sport bullet-time bits (yawn) and switch-and-door puzzles. Gamestyle's favourite puzzle element is courtesy of the Gelatinator, with which you can suck up the gelloid contents of fuel vats and then eject it onto the floor, creating both a bouncy pile of jelly on which you can boing to great heights and a fun variant on the gaming staple of building a stack of crates and jumping up them. Watch out also for the magnetised floors and ceilings on which you can walk. They'll mess with your head.
Insomniac haven't been shy about exploiting the motion-sensing of the Sixaxis: it's used to control some weapons as well as a dancing mini-game. Its best use by far is controlling the Robo-wings, with which, once charged, you can fly around for an unlimited time. This is brilliant enough for its own sake, let alone for being the only way to access some areas. Less fun are the sections in which you must control a laser to demolish rubble, and tilt a circuitboard in order to move the component that completes the circuit. The shape of the Sixaxis controller is roughly like a pair of wings, which means that tilting it more or less correlates directly to the tilt of Ratchet's Robo-wings and so feels intuitive. Using it to move a laser pointer just feels odd, and sadly a bit gimmicky. Thankfully, you can disable motion-sensing and use the left stick should you not be able to get your head around it.
The combat is itself a more cerebral affair than simply pointing your crosshairs at the thing you want to die and then holding down R1. Different guns are best used against different enemies, so you can't rely on one favourite the whole game. Weapon customisation is helped by the pretty neat double-currency system. Bolts are the game's basic money, used for buying weapons and ammo. Raritanium's use is buying mods for your boomsticks such as more ammo slots, faster reload times and more firepower, via a honeycomb grid - buy a mod and the ones next to it unlock. It'll be hard to clear the whole grid for each weapon in one playthrough, so choose wisely. The best mod (we're not saying what) costs a frightening 2,000,000 raritanium.
As well as the Drophyds (the fish dudes), Rachet also has to contend with robot space-pirates, whom you'll engage in spaceship battles of spectacular proportions, set against some quite magnificent stellar scenery. It's hard to concentrate on firing straight when you're hurtling past beautiful nebulae and solar flares, and tearing straight through the trippy heart of a black hole. Gamestyle actually felt quite awed, which was a strange though not unwelcome emotion to feel in what is otherwise quite a silly game.
In fact, at some points the graphics are too good, in the sense that they've been overpolished. Ratchet himself, as well as Captain Qwark and the plumber, actually look worse than they did on the PS2 due to too high a degree of realism being forced onto a very toony character design, giving an overall effect that's quite creepy. Ratchet is also more custard-yellow than the golden-brown he should be, and it's hard to read his fur as fur rather than skin. Bizarrely, the cutscenes that use the in-game engine look better, more alive and three-dimensional, than the entirely pre-rendered ones, which look oddly misty. Gamestyle is hoping that this is just Insomniac getting to grips with the PS3 hardware - something evidenced by the crate physics not being quite right and boxes left floating in mid-air instead of falling.
Insomniac have created a tough task for themselves by stringing the series out this long -- stagnate and you're accused of being a one-trick pony, innovate and gamers will complain that you left out their favourite bits. It's really quite something that they've created something we still want to play, without even minding too much that there aren't any hoverboard races in this one. Tools of Destruction has finally given the PS3 something to be proud of, and is pure nerdvana from start to finish.
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