Ratchet & Clank - Size Matters

The armour system is the thing worth remembering here. Rather than a single upgrade track, you collect helmet, chest, boots and gloves separately across the campaign, and wearing a matched set unlocks a bonus beyond the sum of its pieces. It encourages a kind of fussy inventory tinkering that the main console entries never bothered with, and it gives the mid-game a reason to poke at side areas rather than barrel toward the next arena.

This began life on PSP, handled by High Impact Games, a studio staffed partly by former Insomniac people, and the PS2 conversion carries its origins openly. Levels are tighter and more corridor-shaped than Up Your Arsenal's sprawl. The camera, designed around a handheld with one analogue stick, still feels slightly reluctant to keep up when you strafe hard. Textures are plain. None of this is fatal, but anyone coming straight off Deadlocked will notice the drop in scale within ten minutes.

The plot concerns the Technomites, a hidden race of tiny engineers, which gives the title its pun and the game its best setpieces. Ratchet gets shrunk; Clank, in a recurring turn, is mistaken for royalty and later stomps around as a giant robot in a handful of linear smash-everything stages. Those Clank sequences are shallow but short enough not to wear out their welcome. The weapon roster does the usual honest work, upgrading through use, with the Shock Rocket and the Bee Mine Glove earning their ammunition.

What holds up is the fundamental rhythm the series had already perfected by 2007: a wrench, a crowd, a new gun that changes how the crowd behaves. What does not is the padding. Collecting armour pieces and skill points is fine; being nudged back through cleared ground to find them is less so, and a couple of the vehicle and racing diversions feel inserted to pad a handheld runtime rather than because anyone wanted them.

As a PS2 game it sits awkwardly between the series' console peaks and the PS3 reinvention that followed, a side story built to different constraints and then moved into a house it does not quite fit. Played on its own terms, with expectations set to handheld scale, it is a perfectly solid six hours. Played straight after the trilogy, it feels like meeting the Lombax in a smaller room.