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2021’s Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart is easily my favorite PS5 “exclusive” game. I use “exclusive” in quotation marks since Sony’s growth-obsessive PC initiative means it’s also now out on PC. This action adventure is a thrilling animated masterpiece, blending extreme technical prowess, a fun story, and perfectly-tuned gameplay together into a title that has a wide appeal and accessibility. It’s the sort of game that used to drive millions of units in hardware and software sales — but in today’s oversaturated gaming market it failed to make much of an impact.
Rift Apart is, to date, the only PS5 game I’ve earned a Platinum trophy in, and in which I’ve finished every scrap of content to one hundred percent completion. It is a joyous, well-paced adventure — both a testament to the design strengths of the earlier titles in the series, and a modern showpiece. It pushes Insomniac’s best-in-class engine tech to incredible heights, offering a blend of performance and visuals that few other current generation games have mustered.
The titular rifts are always extraordinary, and they have big gameplay impacts as well. You can use these portals to quickly jump across many of the game’s larger combat encounters, and they also drive many of the standout set piece moments, hurtling you between different environments in a near-instant. The game’s action stands tall against any other modern action game, with a full difficulty system that can make it surprisingly challenging if you want it to be. Although it has plenty of references to the long history of the series, the story largely stands alone, getting you up to speed on what you need to know in its first few minutes. If you want to see one of the best-looking action games ever made, you need to play this — even if you think it’s too “cartoony” looking, I promise it has tons of depth and interesting mechanics to offer you.
Insomniac delivered one of the best-executed games in their history with Rift Apart, but that ended up not mattering — as its market performance was probably nowhere near what Sony hoped for.
