Ratchet and Clank Impressions: WTF, Super Ratchet Galaxy?

I dug out my copy of Ratchet and Clank: A Crack in Time yesterday. It had been sitting lonely on my subwoofer, giving me the stink-eye since the end of October. With a crazy deluge of bonerfying titles, or probably more correctly my fiend-like addiction to MW2, I hadn’t gotten around to playing much of it. It wasn’t out of dislike, but for some reason I was gravitating more towards getting owned by 11 year-olds or playing through Mass Effect for the three-thousandth time.

This game is dope, if R&C is your thing. R&C is a sturdy little franchise. It doesn’t do anything too radical from installment to installment for the most part, but it consistently brings it. You have the typical high-quality gameplay, an amusing storyline that I always forget ten seconds after finishing it, and impressive graphics.

So, whatever. I cracked this bitch open. It’s good, it’s amusing. It gets the job done.

But what I really enjoy so far are the Super Ratchet Galaxy levels. There’s a bunch of levels that are optional as you float through space in your Viper/X-Wing/Whatever you want to call it. You board them, and they’re spherical featuring challenges throughout a Galaxy-esque layout.

I dug them. I didn’t see them coming. When I was scratching my mind-balls about the levels, I remembered that some R&C back in the day featured these sort of spherical levels. I’m far too lazy to look up which game, or recall the particulars from my sludgy, decaying synapses. So maybe it isn’t Galaxy, but rather an extension of Insomniac Games’ prior diddling with the concept.

Nonetheless, they’re an unexpected and enjoyable inclusion. They break up the typical R&C levels nicely, and they’re not mandatory. Side-sessions that allow for some more creative gameplay, if you will.

So far, so good, so what? Yeah, I don’t know. R&C doesn’t reinvent the franchise, and apparently it finishes up the storyline. It’s a great way to wash the taste of getting teabagged by little kids in MW2 out of my mouth, and the Galaxy levels seem to offer something to platformer whores like me who want some optional challenges.