Like a playable Pixar film, Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart is still one of the best reasons to buy a PS5

For gamers of a certain age, watching the cinematic intro of Grand Theft Auto 3 was a watershed moment. With the camera coming to rest behind lead character Claude with the line "…but my hands are all messed up, so you'd better drive, brother," few dared believe the game could possibly continue at the same quality as the cutscene. But you walk to the car, climb in… and the city is yours. The illusion is never broken. Hard to imagine now, as GTA3 is showing its age, but it's even harder to imagine that our now incrementally advancing medium would ever see another jaw-dropping moment like that, where you daren't push the left stick forward for fear of the illusion breaking.

Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart did the unthinkable and managed it. It's been more than four years since the duo stepped into their spectacular victory parade in front of what felt like thousands of adoring fans, but with PS5 turning 5 years old, it's time to revisit Insomniac's modern classic and see whether it still holds up today.

A playable movie

What is immediately apparent is the quality of the animation, which is still bleeding edge. It's arguably the closest a game has come to feeling like - and I'll channel our Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart review here - a playable Pixar film. I'm well aware that kind of praise has been bandied around too much, but this is truly comparable. In a similar fashion, the dialogue is superb, with characters shouting out helpful hints in a much more natural fashion than most games' strictly scripted dialogue cues. In Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, they only say it if they need to. That's really cool.

However, it does already feel like a relic of a bygone era when you're very aware that you're watching anthropomorphic animals and robots talk to each other. I don't remember it feeling out of date at the time, but gaming has become rather serious, at least in AAA circles, so seeing this 'Lombax' with his thick fur and perfect teeth is undeniably jarring in this far more serious world. Admittedly, even on the series' inception on PS2, it was a throwback to 16-bit and 32-bit platform heroes, but now it does feel like it would never get the green light in today's industry. I can't quite believe it exists at all, let alone in this phenomenal state, but I'm so glad it does.

Despite the game's age, coming from a time when Ray Tracing was in its infancy, from a technical standpoint it's still a tour de force. Personally I will always favour fluidity over graphical fidelity, so having a Performance mode here with traditional lighting (and even a second Performance mode with basic Ray Tracing enabled) means the game will always be this fun to play. Games that run at 60fps age better than anything else, it's just a fact.

While it's always gorgeous, Rift Apart the game really hits its stride, not just visually but in its gameplay. This Lombax can really fight. The game's weapons remain some of the absolute finest in gaming, and the sheer volume of explosions and scattered physics objects put even Astro Bot to shame at times. Despite the enemies displaying visible damage on their mechanised bodies, with components catching fire and bodywork splintering off, they still move phenomenally well, exhibiting humanoid staggers and battle flourishes that give even unyielding metal clear personality.

The complexity of the game's control scheme is almost too much to deal with when you return to it after these years away, though it all soon comes flooding back. It's interesting to note that the control options allow you to set all of the traversal commands to just one button if you want to simplify and streamline your experience, but I didn't need it, soon falling back into the standard layout's rewarding groove, boosting around between targets, somersaulting out of harm's way and switching weapons on the fly with the d-pad like I was playing a PlayStation 3 (that's an old joke about Genji: Days of the Blade and I'm not sorry). It's a versatile, customizable, and even tactile experience as the haptic triggers are brought into play with a half-squeeze bringing up shields to absorb fire, then the full squeeze releasing a barrage of revenge bullets. Subsequently being able to boost-run along a wall and swing from the ceiling just makes it obvious that Ratchet – and Insomniac – are really showing off.

It's strange just how much times have changed in these four years. The £69.99 RRP was seen as a premium price for a state-of-the-art product in 2021, yet Mario Kart World's £74.99 is now seen as outrageous, even though I'm sure inflation has gone up more than that £5 in those four years. It certainly feels like it. But this felt worth it, clearly offering a genuine generational leap, and we paid for it, even though we'd had the utterly gorgeous PS4 Ratchet & Clank remake just a couple of years previously. We needed something to truly show the benefits of all that hyper-fast RAM inside the PS5's sleek, white, plastic body. Dimension hopping and lassoing a rift in the space/time continuum still feels novel and exciting. In fact, it makes me wonder why the rest of the generation hasn't quite felt as progressive as this.

Coming back to Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart almost feels like going back way further than just 4 years, passing through the 2000s when the original hit PS2 and going back to the 16-bit era where animals were taking centre stage in many of the biggest releases. To have that '90s ethos realised in Pixar-quality 3D has resulted in a truly timeless video game, and if you have a PS5, you absolutely have to play it.

Check out our best PS5 games ranking for what to play next!