“The more the merrier” only goes so far. When you’re talking about three friends joining you for a session of “Ratchet & Clank: All 4 One,” it’s absolutely true. When you’re talking about all the weapons the developers crammed into the game — and the finger gymnastics required to switch among them — not so much. “All 4 One,” a return to form for the titular duo after their appearance in March’s unfortunate “PlayStation Move Heroes,” employs the tried-and-true gimmick of uniting traditional enemies against a new threat. In the manner of “Super Mario RPG,” which exposed Bowser as a cowardly lizard who was constantly secretly crying, “All 4 One” puts everyone’s favorite lombax-robot duo on the same team of their usual antagonists. Namely, the Buzz Lightyear-esque foil Captain Qwark and main bad guy Doctor Nefarious, who looks like one of the aliens from “Mars Attacks!”
Their coming together to face a common enemy is surprsingly funny, and indeed the game reveals itself to have one of the best scripts of the year, with constant asides from the unseen news anchors who serve as the game’s de facto narrators.
The game can be played by yourself, but it’s definitely better with a few friends so you can experience what the developers call — sigh — “coopetition.” This means that as the two or three or four of you run around clocking and blasting bad guys, you’re also destroying various environmental features to see who gets the most bolts, the game’s currency. This at first seems like a rehash of the tiresome destroy-everything gameplay found in the “Lego” series, but the difference here is the variety with which you destroy everything.
| ‘Ratchet & Clank: All 4 One’ |
| » System: PS3 |
| » Price: $59.99 |
| » Rating: 3 out of 5 stars |
But, as always, too much of a good thing is bad. The game’s makers, seemingly scared of leaving out anyone’s favorite weapon, has included an arsenal here. This makes sense in a single-player game, but a family-friendly, four-player game is likely to be played by folks who aren’t used to sophisticated controller commands.
The game gives you big damage bonuses if your entire team is attacking with the same weapon. Trouble is, if you’re playing with anyone but gaming veterans, this leads to a whole lot of “Switch to the Plasma Bomb Launcher! … Uh, move the right joystick, then hit that shoulder button, then it’s the one on the upper left.”
The game’s best moments, then, revolve not around weapon coordination but traditional cooperative platforming, like switch puzzles, and the game would have profited from keeping the shooting simple and focusing on the kind of gameplay that’s fun no matter what series it appears in.
“All 4 One” is fun and funny, but hurting a few fans’ feelings would have been worth it to bring a few more into the fold.
