I think my favorite game genre is “go places and do things”. Especially when there are multiple objectives that I can pursue in an order and pace of my choosing.
Prominent examples include 3D platformers like Jak & Daxter and Ratchet & Clank, open world games like inFAMOUS and Saints Row, and action RPGs like Dragon Quest Heroes II and Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning.
Some games from adjacent genres qualify as well, such as MMO City of Heroes, Metroidvania SteamWorld Dig 2, and life sim Disney Magical World.
Insomniac’s Ratchet and Clank have come a long way. Seven years after their first outing in late 2002, Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack In Time marks the ninth installment of a franchise spanning three platforms. (Tenth and four if you count the oft-forgotten Ratchet & Clank: Going Mobile.) They’ve even got action figures now.
A Crack In Time is easily the best Ratchet & Clank game on the PS3, and will be many fans' favorite of the whole series. It certainly does have several series bests: the best writing, the best humor, the best Clank gameplay, the return of the series’s best villain, and the single most fascinating and complex character ever to grace a Ratchet & Clank game.
But to understand A Crack In Time’s greatest triumph, what it accomplishes that none of its predecessors do, we have to look back through the evolutionary paths traced by the series.
