Ratchet & Clank: Into the Nexus (PlayStation 3) review "Perhaps a bit too short, but still a really fun ride. "

While Ratchet & Clank: Into the Nexus doesn't feature the word "Future" anywhere in the title, it is to my understanding that it is considered the final game in Ratchet & Clank's Future sub-series. Just like Tools of Destruction, Quest for Booty and A Crack in Time, it was released on the PlayStation 3 and it does build off the plot established in those other games. I also seem to have a vague memory of it being considered a sort of epilogue to them, so, yeah, let's roll with that.

The action picks up some point after the conclusion of A Crack in Time with Ratchet and Clank on a spaceship with a pair of helper robots in an attempt to transport Vendra Prog — a notorious criminal with psychic powers — to imprisonment. The credits would be rolling shortly after you started a new game if this task met with success, though. Vendra's brother, Neftin, was able to recruit a gang of criminals and launches an all-out assault on the ship, resulting in him rescuing Vendra, the robots going down with the ship and Ratchet and Clank hitchhiking a ride on an enemy ship in an attempt to stop their plans before things REALLY go haywire.

So, what are these plans? Well, remember how a key element of A Crack in Time's plot revolved around how virtually every member of the Lombax race besides Ratchet and one other guy were in another dimension and that other guy was pretty damn determined to reunite with them, regardless of the cost? The Prog siblings also have been separated from their race in much the same way and they (particularly Vendra) are pretty damn determined to reunite with them. To that effect, they're planning to tear a hole in the dimensional fabric to bring over a giant eye monster and all its monster cohorts because that thing offered its help in making their reunion happen. And if you can't trust a giant eye monster, really, who can you trust?

Well, not to give away too many plot elements, but let's just say that when you have a choice in the matter, trusting giant eye monsters just because they say they'll give you what you want is about like trusting politicians when they do the same. Fortunately for Ratchet, shooting the holy hell out of giant eye monsters hasn't been made illegal yet, so, at least in this game, our heroes will have a chance!



When it comes to story-telling, the main strength of this game is how it manages to tell a fairly good tale in a short period of time. After going through the game-beginning "assault on the spaceship" level, you'll have four worlds and a mostly-optional arena to play through. While these planets are a fair bit larger than those in A Crack in Time, they still won't take overly long to go through. Hell, with one of them, you only have to collect 10 of an item, trade them to a smuggler for hoverboots and use those to find your way to a meeting with another character. All of the rest — exploring the bulk of the planet, collecting more of those items to trade for other things and finding keys to unlock a vault — is completely optional, meaning a person could be in and out of this place in under 30 minutes if they keep to the essentials.

And, yet, everything works. You have a lengthy chase, a betrayal, an uneasy alliance and a final confrontation with none of it feeling rushed. I mean, things might feel a bit truncated at times, but not to a level where I felt bothered by things being resolved too quickly and/or anticlimactically. To go with that, Into the Nexus maintains the same sort of enjoyable play that caused me to fall in love with A Crack in Time Ratchet will get a lot of weapons and, in this game, he'll be able to collect crystals to regularly upgrade them in multiple ways.

Take Mr. Zurkon, for example. In A Crack in Time that little robot might provide additional firepower when summoned, but he was pretty weak and struggled to make a difference against anything other than weak foes. Here, he can be developed into a game-breaker. By leveling him up via repeated use, you'll be able to summon wife and child models to give you three little robots instead of one. By using those crystals, you'll be able to (among other things) allow their summon duration to last longer. Eventually, when I was going against anything remotely tough, I'd immediately call up Mr. Zurkon and find myself tearing through that enemy's health far quicker than Ratchet would have on his own.



And every weapon gets that treatment. Power up your basic blaster and you'll gain a second one for dual-wielding. Do the same to the shotgun and fire blasts that temporarily freeze an enemy in place, making it child's play to shoot them again. Using crystals to fill all the nodes on their power-up screen can do such things as increase your ammo capacity, give you more bolt currency for kills or even cause foes to semi-regularly drop more crystals for even more improvements. And with nearly a dozen different weapons, that means there's a lot you can potentially do with Ratchet during the course of a game that probably wouldn't take longer than about a dozen hours to beat.

When not shooting foes with his arsenal, Ratchet will be using his gadgets. Early on, he'll get a gun that can be fired at certain surfaces to create a beam that will carry him from one surface to the next. By doing the mandatory part of the arena, he'll get a jetpack that can be quite handy in accessing hard-to-reach places on a couple planets. The hoverboots allow him to speed up ramps to jump from one location to another — something that becomes very useful the instant you earn it.

Also, much like A Crack in Time, Clank has his own little stages to go through. Occasionally, Ratchet will reach a dead end in a planet, but there will be a small dimensional rift which Clank can enter in order to manipulate gravity to reach a monster, wake it up and dodge it while making it back to the entrance — causing that monster to smash through and remove whatever was obstructing Ratchet's progress. There might only be a handful of these things to do and none of them are particularly long, but they are a fun change of pace that gave me the vibe of a particularly quirky, side-scrolling platformer.

Overall, I had little to complain about with Into the Nexus. I would have liked a longer game, as I do prefer it when stuff I really like doesn't end quite so quickly. A couple kinds of mini-boss show up pretty frequently with little to no variance between each confrontation. Of the game's actual boss fights, the mid-game confrontation with Neftin was the only one that really met the standard set by the more enjoyable ones in A Crack in Time.

Still, even if this is a shortish Ratchet & Clank game that isn't perfect in every way, it's still a lot of fun to go through and even has a fair amount of replay value thanks to a tougher difficulty level that unlocks after beating the game. Even better: While you can only power up your weaponry to level three in the base game, in this mode, you get to go all the way to a sixth level. But even if you only play the game once, it's a fitting conclusion to the Future sub-series, containing a lot of nostalgic moments while providing a fun romp.

Staff review by Rob Hamilton (September 30, 2022) Rob Hamilton is the official drunken master of review writing for Honestgamers.