Ratchet: Deadlocked Review

Played this game for the first time in a long while and I even beat it on the PS3 version at that. It's weird, the port isn't THAT bad. The framerate slows down when there is a lot of action and there is some weird audio glitches but it's an okay port.

The game is probably the best spin off game in the Ratchet series or at least tied with All 4 One. The game is light on platforming and exploration and instead just shooting galleries and you do objectives during those shooting galleries, if you ever wanted a full on Ratchet shooting game then this game is it. It is interesting the Halo inspirations the game has you have a radar telling you where enemies are, you have vehicle sections, Clank is a voice inside your head like Cortana, and Ratchet wears power armor. As a Ratchet shooting gallery, its pretty solid, I'd say it at least beats Ratchet 2002, the aiming is the by far the smoothest out of the PS2 games due to the fact you don't need to hold a button to strafe, Ratchet kind of controls like an fps character on consoles like MC from Halo. The autoaim tracks enemies well, there is also a decent amount of adversaries to face in combat, the campanion AI is decent enough except for one glitch that made me restart which could be due to the port.

The story is pretty decent here. People talk about the consumerism themes in Ratchet and here, it's much more well realized since the setting, overarching story, the presentation and what the player are doing are all in "harmony" of each other making the themes more poignant. Ace Hardlight and Gleeman Vox are pretty enjoyable and are some of the more memorable villains in the series. The game should've ended when Ace was beaten or at least cut the Ghost section out of the game.

The music is also the best in the series.

Which now leads to the negatives, the game pretty much rewards you every 10 seconds, you keep getting weapons and mods for them very easily, and you don't have to worry about saving up bolts either, that and weapons upgrade every 10 seconds, so it feels like you got everything way before the end of the game. Overall, I get why me as a kid liked the game so much. It's pretty fun now too, Insomniac knows how to make coop games I actually like.