Ratchet & Clank - Up Your Arsenal

Weapons that level up with use was the change that reorganised everything else. Earlier Ratchet games treated the arsenal as a toybox you dipped into for novelty; here every gun earns experience, upgrades its model and name, and quietly encourages you to keep favourites in rotation rather than hoarding ammo for a boss. The Plasma Whip or the Agents of Doom stop being gags and become builds. It is the moment the series admitted it was a shooter wearing a platformer's fur.

Insomniac shipped it in 2004, a year after Going Commando, and the pace of that output shows in the best way: nothing feels like a first draft. Strafing is bound properly, the camera behaves, and the weapon wheel slows time just enough to swap under fire without breaking the rhythm. Levels run wider than before, with set-piece defences and vehicle detours that break up the loop. The writing is sharper too, built around Captain Qwark's self-mythologising and the Secret Agent Clank serials, which do more comedic work in two minutes than most licensed platformers of the era managed in ten hours.

The online component deserves a note, because a 2004 PS2 platformer with competitive multiplayer was not a small thing. Up to eight players, modes built around capturing bases and holding ground, maps that leaned on the same jump-and-strafe movement as the campaign. It worked, it had a real community for a while, and it is now a historical footnote you can only read about rather than play.

What has aged is mostly cosmetic. The resolution flattens the detail Insomniac packed into the backgrounds, and the arena challenges lean hard on repetition when you are grinding bolts for the late-game Harbinger or RYNO. But the central appeal is intact: enemies arrive in waves large enough to justify crowd-control weapons, the terrain keeps you moving, and the upgrade meters tick over just fast enough that you never want to stop shooting.

Among the PS2's run of character-action platformers it is the one that best understood its own strengths. Play it now and the fur and the jokes read as cover for a very well-tuned third-person shooter, which is exactly what the next decade of the series became.