At one point, the PS5 had 2 games that were nowhere else, and that were basically the only real reasons to own a PS5, since a PS4 or PC got you basically everything it got. Well, this changed earlier this year when Returnal had a solid PC port, and that changed further last week when Ratchet & Clank Rift Apart also got a PC port. Now the PS5 only has… FFXVI, which will come out to PC later (it was announced for PC first) and Spider-Man 2 (coming later this year), which will come out to PC later (as evidenced by the previous games coming to PC later). So basically the PS5 has nothing.
I was pretty happy to see this get a PC port, because I didn’t want to get a PS5 just to play this one game. And I certainly have things to say about this game… So yeah let’s do that.
The PC port is good but terrible
I do think I need to start with this because… holy shit. This port is certainly something. It’s actually really weird. It’s simultaneously a great port… and a really fucking garbage one.
Namely, it has issues seemingly with using way too much VRAM for no reason and crashing suddenly. A lot. See, I have a 3080. No longer the best card you can get, but still very much in the upper echelon of GPUs. There are no games this card should not absolutely wreck. But this game, it’s just constantly crashing. For me, I was getting 5-10 minutes of gameplay and it crashed… at first. This was an inconsistent issue, but also a constant one. At some points in the game I’d barely get 2 minutes of gameplay.
I thought it might have been on my side, like something not updated… so I updated my chipset, my bios, reconfigured my bios. Made sure my GPU was updated… ReBAR on? ReBAR off? Whatever, nothing did anything.
I was running this at 1440p, with all graphic options at high/very high. Eventually with DLSS on Quality I actually managed to get a good couple hours of the game running well, but then the crashing started again, even more frequently. I’d hardly get partway through a combat encounter before crashing. So I reduced a few settings, put DLSS on Balanced, and finally that seemed to be the sweet spot. I shouldn’t need to find a sweet spot for “the game not crashing every 2-5 minutes”.
Look, I have a 3080, that’s something WAY stronger than the PS5 the game was originally made for. It’s a GPU strong enough that I should be able to decide if I want high FPS or top-level graphics without being worried that any of the option causing the game to crash. And, in this case, it’s not even the highest quality options that caused crashes, it was running the game at “just” high settings at 1440p (there’s also “Very High” and “Ultra” on every setting). If I have to, it’s because the devs did their job badly.
What really annoys me about how awful this port is… is how good this port is. Because man does this game run quite well. At 1440p I was getting, depending on how much shit was going on, between 120-180fps (generally in the 160fps area), which is fairly solid considering how good this looks. With lower settings where the game wouldn’t crash (or would crash less), I’d get 180-200fps in most sections. This game is beautiful and fucking smooth, but it’s hard to enjoy when you know it’s liable to crash every other second.
Every team tasked to port a console game needs to actually have a good testing process. Because this game had seemingly no testing process. They NEED to actually test their game on a variety of possible PC configuration, with people who know how PC hardware works and can actually figure out why their shit’s crashing (in this case, it seems to be unreasonable VRAM usage).
Other than that, the game’s good
Well ignoring the garbage PC port job (as of this writing)… I mean, this game’s quite good.
The story’s fine, I was expecting worse but this was solid. Ratchet and Clank have been doing less hero-y stuff recently, but during a parade celebrating their heroism where Clank was going to give a Dimensionator to Ratchet so he could try to find other Lombaxes through different dimensions, bnut Dr Nefarious comes in to ruin things and ends up causing dimensional rift issues that risks destroying all dimensions. Everyone ends up in a dimension where Nefarious is Emperor, and there’s plenty of alternate-universe versions of each of the characters, including Rivet, who is a Lombax. Clank and Ratchet and up splitting up, Clank teaming up with Rivet and Ratchet ending up finding a Clank-like robot that he ends up nicknaming Kit, trying to deal with the
R&C is known for its cool weapons, fun action and occasional pretty okay puzzle segments… And that’s what’s you’re getting here. The shooting and movement is super smooth and fun. The levels are fun, the bosses are cool… I kinda wish I had something to complain about gameplay-wise because then this part of the mini-review would be interesting. But no, this game is very solid, the controls feel fantastic, and it’s just fun.
The weapon system is fun too, you get EXP for the weapon by dealing damage, then at the weapon shop, the higher the levels, the more power-ups you get access to in the skill tree for the weapon, which you can buy with raritanium you find all over the place. So you can focus your resources on the weapons you prefer. You also level yourself up as you kill stuff, it just gives you a bit of extra Max HP.
Graphically it’s fucking awe-inspiring. It’s rare I say that, because technically a lot of games are shitty garbage with realistic graphics and no imagination so even if technically they’re solid… they’re also garbage to look at because there’s nothing of interest being rendered on-screen. So when a game like Rift Apart comes out with COLOR and visually cool imaginative areas and interesting character designs that aren’t just a random guy down the street… I gotta appreciate it.
If I have anything resembling complaints… I thought it was kinda weird how Rivet and Ratchet just share everything. It helps making things consistent so I understand it from a gameplay level, but I thought it was pretty weird anyways. Like, I got these dashing boost boots on the planet with Gary and the other dimensional monk people, but then the next time I played as Rivet, she also had those boots without having to get them herself. I think it would’ve been at least a bit interesting to give each character their own abilities the other didn’t have so they’d have slightly different gameplay.
Overall
If this wasn’t such a bad port that crashes all the time because of VRAM usage issues, this would be a shining example of a PC port. Which is really weird to say.
The game itself, great. When it runs, it runs very well. The graphics are fucking amazing. The gameplay itself is very fun, I enjoy many of the weapons, some of the boss fights are quite fun… I don’t really have too many complaints as far as the game design, which is a rarity these days.
I do recommend buying this game when they finally decide to patch in something to fix the crashing, it’s quite fun. Before they patch it, do not touch.
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