’Ratchet and Clank’ Remakes Itself Brilliantly. Too Bad It Refines Nothing.

Fourteen years ago, the climax of the first Ratchet and Clank hinged on a betrayal: superhero blowhard Captain Qwark (think The Tick in space) turning on Ratchet. Now, in the 2016 installment, that twist becomes a framing device as Qwark, from a prison cell, narrates the story to his fellow inmates. It's a canny way to explain away any narrative differences between the original Ratchet and Clank and this one—but also a winking move toward self-awareness. "We know, we know, you've probably heard this before.... Wanna hear it again?"

This newest title in the series about the space adventures of a gun-toting fox-cat-dude and his no-nonsense robot has plenty to recommend it. It's a full-scale reimagining of the 2002 PlayStation 2 original, and comes from Insomniac Games, the franchise's primary developer. This Ratchet hits all the same beats as that first game, only bigger and shinier. The PlayStation 4's technology makes for incredibly sharp and detailed cartoon art alongside dense, large-scale combat encounters. It ticks all the boxes: satisfying platforming, witty writing, and goofy guns that remain satisfying to use. Who else lets you turn your enemies into pixelated sheep and then break them with a wrench to arcade-style victory sounds?

But the game is also dreadfully familiar. As Ratchet, you go on an adventure from his humble beginnings as a wrench-toting mechanic to a galactic hero, killing scores of robots and aliens in creative, cartoonish ways in the process. If you've played the original games, none of this is fresh or surprising. The plot has been shifted around here or there, accommodating story beats and characters from the upcoming animated film adaptation of the same story. Ratchet's a lot nicer to Clank than he was in the original, reflecting the camaraderie the two share in later games. But, all in all, it's somewhere players of the 2002 original have been before. When it comes down to it, Captain Qwark's retelling of that old story is a lot more faithful than the opening wink suggests.

Videogames, as an industry and a culture, have an odd relationship with nostalgia. The past is at once something to venerate and to revisit. We want things the way they used to be, mimicking and reviving the games we enjoyed in the past, the ones that drew us into the medium---but we also want their errors and failures erased. Give us more of the same, we insist, but better and smarter, with a chemical peel that smooths away the roughness.