I was about 2 weeks late to the party in getting my hands on the newest R&C to PS5 and even later getting this review out. I don't have anything new to add to the general reviews that say it's one of the best-looking games out there. Reviewers have talked about the short-but-sweet campaign with a trophy list that can be completed under 20 hours. Rift Apart shows well-done PS5 features with the DualSense upgrades and well-done 3d audio quality that is the new standard this generation. No surprises, here.
However, I want to talk about the fact that Rift Apart absolutely dunks on the vast majority of console games in terms of accessibility. Insomniac hangs onto that rim and just marinates in the moment of their glorious feature list. Aside from five gameplay difficulties, I counted 46 tick boxes, sliders and options under Accessibility settings.
For a few years now, I've wanted better text visibility with these high resolutions that were shrinking text smaller and smaller over the years. More passionately, I've written about custom button mapping as an industry baseline. Insomniac put in TWO custom button profile options to map your controls however you like. There are a buffet of features that will affect my immersion and engagement level with Ratchet, Clank and Rivet.
R&C is not just gorgeous to look at, it's gorgeous to watch. The animations look great in 30 OR 60 fps and involve stretching, squishing, bending and a lot of expressiveness. The detail of movements here will provide more lasting power than the pixel count and texture quality of the generation. There was a part of a level where I was at a party and there was a prompt for Rivet to dance for a few seconds. I stopped to ask myself how awesome this *chef kissing fingers* premium-quality game would be if I hit that prompt again and got different dance animation. I GOT SEVEN DANCES. We're still early on in the Playstation 5's AAA title count and this is Insomniac raising the bar substantially.
One final shoutout is to the game's difficulties, which are adjusted by enemy aggressiveness, health and damage (see first bank of pictures way above). A lot of games define difficulty through the latter two, while the first is an actual tweak to behavior and changes the experience on a different level. In my second playthrough on difficulty 4/5, the enemies tracked my movement and shot there instead of at me like they did on 3/5. I'm pretty good at games in this franchise and I got my ass kicked in the second arena challenge three blissful times on 3 and many more times on 4. Overall, it tests your reflexes more than R&C 2016.
If you like video games at all, I would suggest Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart. It truly shows off your PS5's capabilities, there's funny dialogue, the animation is stellar, the sound design is wonderful, and with over 40 accessibility options, you can absolutely play it your way.
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