Secret Agent Clank

Handing the lead to the sidekick is the sort of idea that usually stays a joke in a cutscene. Here it becomes the whole premise: Ratchet is framed for theft and locked up, and the little robot who normally rides on his back puts on a tuxedo and goes to work as a secret agent, complete with bow-tie boomerang, cufflink bombs and a tie that doubles as a weapon. The Bond pastiche is committed to rather than winked at, right down to the lounge-jazz sting.

The structure splits three ways, and that is the design's most interesting gamble. Clank's chapters lean on stealth and gadget work, closer in temperament to Sly Cooper than to the run-and-gun rhythm the series was built on, with guards to slip past and rhythm-timed sneaking sequences. Ratchet's prison sections are arena combat, fighting waves of inmates with improvised weapons. And Captain Qwark narrates his own heavily embellished heroism in levels that exist mainly to undercut him. The tonal variety is genuine. The consistency is not.

What carries it is the writing. High Impact Games had already handled Size Matters, and the studio understood that the comedy in this series works because the universe plays its absurdity straight. Qwark's chapters in particular land, since the gag is baked into the level design rather than bolted on as dialogue. The stealth, by contrast, is the weakest strand: detection is unforgiving in a way the character's moveset does not really support, and the timing minigames repeat well past their welcome.

Originally a PSP title, the game arrived on PS2 as a conversion handled by Sanzaru Games, and the seams are visible. Environments are smaller and simpler than the console entries in the series, camera control is fussier than it should be, and the whole thing moves at a handheld's pacing, in short chapters with frequent interruptions. On a television that briskness can read as thinness rather than convenience.

It is a curiosity more than a highlight, the sort of spin-off that arrived late in the PS2's life when the platform had become a place for ports rather than premieres. Worth playing if you want to see the Ratchet formula pulled apart and reassembled around a character who was never meant to hold a camera on his own, and who turns out to be funnier for it than anyone expected.