Ratchet & Clank

The Suck Cannon tells you most of what you need to know. Point it at a small hopping enemy, inhale it, then fire the thing at its friends. It is a joke weapon that happens to be genuinely useful, and it sits in an arsenal alongside a glove that throws spring-loaded bombs and a device that turns guards into chickens. Insomniac had spent the PS1 years on Spyro, all gliding and gem-collecting, and the shift here is blunt: collectibles became currency, currency bought guns, and the platformer stopped being about what you could reach and started being about what you could afford.

That economy is the spine of the game. Bolts drop from crates and corpses, Gadgetron vendors appear on most planets, and the decision of whether to save for the Visibomb or settle for something cheaper is the closest the 2002 original comes to a progression system. It is a lopsided design. Weapons do not level up the way they would from the sequel onward, so the wrench stays viable far longer than it should and a few purchases quietly become the answer to everything. The gadgets are the better half — the Swingshot, the Trespasser, the hydrodisplacer — because they gate the world in the old Nintendo 64 manner and give you reason to come back to a planet you thought you were done with.

Ratchet himself is worth noting because the series later sanded him down. Here he is impatient, a bit mean, and Clank spends the first act putting up with him rather than assisting him. The plot runs on Chairman Drek's plan to build a new homeworld out of chunks of existing ones, which is funnier and darker than most PS2 mascot fiction bothered to be, and the Captain Qwark subplot lands its turn well.

What holds up is the look and the flow. The planets are dense, colourful and varied in a way few sixth-generation platformers managed, and the camera, while it needs manual work on the right stick, is not the liability it could have been. What has aged is the strafing: without lock-strafe as standard, firing while circling an enemy feels stiffer than anything the sequels ask of you, and a couple of late-game arenas are harder than their design deserves.

Go back to it and you find a game still working out what it wanted to be, halfway between a collectathon and a shooter, with the pieces of both lying in plain view. That untidiness is part of why it remains the most interesting entry in the run.