While the humor from the Spyro series is turned up to a new degree, particularly thanks to Clank who shines as Ratchet’s robotic companion, the game lacks the whimsical charm that was a significant contributor to Spyro’s success. The original title also shows its age with its lack of recurring characters and bare-bones narrative.
And other than the bolts used as the game’s currency, the focus on collecting and exploring was virtually absent from Ratchet and Clank.
While the enemies reacting to the player was a novel concept in 1998, by 2002 it had become commonplace and was no longer a selling point for Insomniac’s new IP. It was a lot to digest for Spyro fans compared to Spyro, Ratchet and Clank was a much more combat-focused, difficult game that, on the surface, holds little in common with the minuscule purple dragon from the last era. While it seems commonplace now, bringing guns into a platformer was a new idea in 2002, perhaps contributing to Ratchet and Clank’s unfair Teen rating by the ESRB.
Insomniac could have probably very easily stuck to its collect-a-thon roots with a new bi-pedal character and continued to milk their already proven formula, but they chose to make a much more daring move by focusing on weapon-based combat with Ratchet and Clank. But after parting ways with Universal, Insomniac lost its license to its flagship franchise just as the Playstation 2 began making its first of many rounds on store shelves. The Spyro formula was not only a runaway success for Insomniac and Sony, it was a new benchmark for a genre in the midst of its ultimate boom period. Coming in a couple of years late to the party, Insomniac released Spyro the Dragon for the Playstation in 1998, building off of what had already become commonplace in the genre while striding forward with a significant emphasis on item collecting, high-flying platforming, and enemy pathing.
At turn of the century, following the runaway success of Nintendo’s Super Mario 64, the gaming landscape was rife with 3D platformers eager to stand out among their peers.
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