Developer/publisher SIE (Insomniac Games)

Format PS5

Release Out now

Something goes wrong in the opening 15 minutes of Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart. That in itself is not a surprise: it’s how videogame stories often begin, after all. But this development is particularly unexpected. During a lavish ticker-tape parade to celebrate our heroes in Megalopolis, Clank presents a gift to his Lombax partner: it’s a gadget called the Dimensionator, designed to open rifts to other dimensions. He gives it hoping to enable Ratchet to meet more of his kind. We’ve seen the Dimensionator in previous games, so it’s no great revelation that it should turn up here. Nor that it should find its way into the wrong hands. Nor that those hands belong to returning antagonist Dr Nefarious. But during the chase to retrieve it, we jump at the wrong time and fall just short of a grind rail. And then we keep falling. It takes a good ten seconds or so to realise our extended plunge isn’t part of the plan – we haven’t blundered into a rift, but a glitch in the game itself. Throughout the ten to 12 hours that follow, there’s no bigger bombshell.

Not everyone will see that as a criticism; to some, it will be an invitation. Because for better or worse, Rift Apart is pretty much exactly the game you expect it to be. It doesn’t fall below our expectations (apart from that early eye-opener, and it would be unfair to linger further when at the time we simply reload from the checkpoint a few moments before, and continue), nor does it exceed them. It meets its remit to the letter. This is a beautiful action-platformer, a typically fast-paced planet-hopping adventure in the vein of its many predecessors. It is an attractive showcase for PS5’s visual capabilities, and a flex of the muscles for its solid state drive, which, as promised, allows our heroes to move from one dimension to another almost instantaneously. Much of its expansive arsenal shows off the DualSense’s adaptive triggers, as you squeeze them halfway for one mode of fire and fully depress them for another. And the controller’s speaker and haptic feedback combine in mildly diverting ways – most notably, capturing the sensation of tapping away at a computer terminal. If that is what you wanted from Rift Apart, it will undoubtedly show you a good time, as Insomniac’s games so often do. And if you were hoping for more? Well. This may not be the Lombax you’re looking for.