5 things you'll hate about Ratchet & Clank Future

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...and a few you'll love, plus new screens and hands-on impressions

Right now, every other major game-news outlet on the planet is telling you about the trip they took down to developer Insomniac's headquarters in Burbank, Calif., last week to play Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction, and how awesome the game is going to be. We took the same trip, but even though we liked what we saw, and even though we're confident Insomniac won't release anything less than a top-notch product, there were a few things that got under our skin. They got under a lot of other people's skin as well, judging by the conversations after the event, but these complaints are typically the sorts of things game journalists vent angrily about in private and then gloss over with a quick "oh uh we're sure this will be fixed before the game ships" in writing, assuming they even mention them at all.

Look, you already know Ratchet & Clank Future is going to rock. Telling you that would be a waste of time. So instead, we'll be brutally honest and focus on the five worst things we noticed about the game. And because we're not total bastards, we'll then point out a few things that particularly impressed us about the game, as well. Let's get started:

1. Next-gen coolness aside, this is the same old Ratchet
Granted, we've only played through a few of Ratchet & Clank Future's levels, but the gameplay therein was almost indistinguishable from the last five Ratchet games. There are new weapons, new levels and a new story, but every other Ratchet & Clank had that stuff, too. Underneath it all is the same wrench-swinging, rail-grinding, crate-bashing, gadget-happy platformer-meets-shooter gameplay you came to love on the PS2.

And that's good, right? Well... not when you can play a PS2 game and get an experience that's eerily similar to one you could get with a flagship PS3 title, no. We realize many of you are going to read this and have the same knee-jerk reaction: "That's not something to hate!" We also realize that the last game to tamper with the formula was Ratchet: Deadlocked, and that it kind of sucked as a result.

Mikel Reparaz
Mikel Reparaz
After graduating from college in 2000 with a BA in journalism, I worked for five years as a copy editor, page designer and videogame-review columnist at a couple of mid-sized newspapers you've never heard of. My column eventually got me a freelancing gig with GMR magazine, which folded a few months later. I was hired on full-time by GamesRadar in late 2005, and have since been paid actual money to write silly articles about lovable blobs.