Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart Review

Insomniac took the one hardware feature Sony sold the console on and turned it into a verb. Rifts tear open mid firefight and yank you into a different planet's geometry with no cut, no elevator and no corridor of pretend, and the trick never stops being startling because the game keeps escalating what waits on the other side.

That is the headline, but the sturdier achievement is that the shooting finally matches the ideas. The Ricochet, the Topiary Sprinkler and the Negatron Collider give every arena a different solution, upgrade paths reward using all of them rather than hoarding one, and the Rift Tether makes traversal part of combat instead of a break from it.

Rivet is a better designed protagonist than Ratchet, and handing her the emotional weight of the plot was the correct instinct. The story itself is Saturday morning comfortable, with a villain who never threatens anyone, and the difficulty stays gentle enough that the arsenal outpaces the enemies well before the end. What it looks like is the argument. Fur, ray traced reflections and a stable sixty frames made this the generation's first real showpiece.