I had some time today to sit down with “Ratchet and Clank Future: A Crack in Time“. It seems like an all around improvement, the controls seem noticeably more responsive (not that they were bad before, but they feel really tight now), and the animations seem crisp and more polished.

I’ve played long enough to see some of Clank’s time based puzzles and long enough to hit a spot that made me scratch my head a little bit. I can see how these have the potential to introduce some very complicated/fun puzzles down the road. I understand they are much like the puzzles in braid, but while I played Braid I didn’t get all that far, so the time pieces still feel like a very fresh, and refreshing element to platform puzzling.

I’ve opted to play through on hard difficulty on the initial play through, if Uncharted 2 has taught me anything is that I may be easily convinced to do some trophy hunting on really good games, so I’m more or less playing hard to avoid having to get that trophy (if there even is a trophy for that) some other time. It hasn’t been terribly challenging yet, although I have died a few times due to carelessness that probably wouldn’t have killed me on normal difficulty. I’ve been having some fun with the side missions on the various moons in each area… each seems to present either a platforming or arena like challenge rewarding you with gold bolts or Zoni (which are used to upgrade your ship). The space travel isn’t all that great but I can see why they’d throw it in there for some change of pace every now and then.

This has so far been an excellent addition to the franchise, and I can’t wait to see what happens next.