2,000,000 Bolts Of Disappointment

Over the last couple weeks, Vicki and I have been playing Ratchet: Deadlocked, the 2006 entrant into the Ratchet & Clank PS/2 (and now PS/3) franchise. We actually purchased the game back in late 2006, played it a little and decided that it just wasn't holding our interest, and moved on to something else. With a new game, R&C Future: Tools of Destruction just recently launched, and a short demo for it downloaded by us and enjoyed, it had seemed like a good time to revisit Deadlocked and see if we could finally get some of our money's worth out of it.

Well, probably due to lowered expectations as well as absence making the heart growing fonder (over the past two years), it was more fun this time around. The format change, away from the story-based approach of the former versions and into a much more linear - not to mention campaign-based and arena-centric - style, still detracts from the game's appeal. But once you're past that, the Co-Op mode is reasonably good if two of you want to play at the same time, the fact that you can select the difficulty level anew each time you load the game delights me no end, and the weapons are a major selling point once again.

Except for one, that is. In games past, there's often been a mega-weapon, much more expensive than any others, that the dedicated gamer aspires to, no matter how ridiculously many bolts you have to collect in order to afford it. (Bolts are the currency in R&C games, and you get them for smashing or blowing up stuff, including enemies.) One of the earliest instances of this was the RYNO gun, which stood for Rip You a New One... and it lived up to its name! It was a quantum leap more powerful and destructive than any of the standard weapons in that particular game, and so spending a couple dozen hours of replaying levels paid off once you got your furry little hands on that sucker! Ah, the sheer mayhem of the RYNO....

Not so much this time around. For the heart-stopping price of two million bolts, Ratchet: Deadlocked offers you the Harbinger, complete with a sales pitch claiming, in essence, that it is to the RYNO as the atom bomb is to the slingshot. So of course I just had to have one!

Having now used it a few times, though, I'd say it was overpriced by a factor of 2 or 3. Yeah, it's a nice gimmick: when you pull the trigger, targets appear under several of your nearest enemies just before destruction rains down upon them in the form of... well, I guess you'd say, columns of all-powerful, God-like energy beams! Where it fails you, though, is that it initially maxes out at 4 pieces of ammo - none of which you can find in the game, unlike every other piece of your arsenal - and leaves you as a sitting duck if you've got more combatants than artillery, especially since you're inclined to stand there and watch the fireworks!

If the rest of your weaponry were weak, I think the Harbinger would live up to the hype - and sticker price - but the fact is that several cheaper guns, if you've used them a lot and leveled them up as we had, are very nearly as impressive and effective. I absolutely adore my automated turret guns, arbiter, floating/targeting mines, scorpion tail and fusion rifle, all of which are quite devastating in their upgraded form. Since you can only really get the Harbinger toward the end of the game - did I mention that it costs 2,000,000 bolts? - the opportunities to upgrade it (through repeated use) are considerably less. On a lark, I did spend some time this morning running around, killing everything in sight with my new toy. After the third upgrade, all of which simply added one to the maximum ammo count, I came to the conclusion that leveling up the Harbinger hardly seemed worth the effort. Especially annoying is the fact that one of the big tournaments battle near the end, which you have to get through in order to keep going, pre-assigns what weapon you can use for it, and doesn't include the Harbinger. Bummer.

Another annoying characteristic of the game occurs when you replay arena battles. If you lose, then you play again (which is fine); if you win, then you're taken back to the main station and have to select the arena again and wait through the cut-scene showing the trip back. This proved quite frustrating as I spent many hours building up bolts in some of my favourite battles, again and again. I actually got to the point where I'd intentionally lose rather than suffer through the delay of starting each one up again. Silly game flow on someone's part.

All in all, I'd consider Rachet: Deadlocked an above average PS/3 game but a significantly-below average Ratchet and Clank game. The early reviews of Tools of Destruction, along with the demo we played, lead me to believe that they've gotten the franchise back onto the (grind) rails with the latest offering. Come Christmas this year, I'm sure we'll be playing it and finding out for ourselves!