Hello and welcome to platinum review, a series where we talk about some amazing games, breakdown the roadmap to platinum trophy and I share with you my thoughts on whether you should add another platinum trophy to your collection. This week we will be talking about one of the more anticipated games of 2021, Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart.

My Thoughts About Rift Apart

I really like the world building and level design in this game. When you get to your first actual level in Nafarious City it blew my mind with how detailed and pretty everything looked. Also, the first level kind of reminded of another recent game with a dark neon city. Hmm…

If you played and enjoyed previous Ratchet and Clank games you will like this one.

The gameplay is fluid and action packed. Combat was even better than in the 2016 game and the enemy variety was great. There are even some Boss fights sprinkled throughout the game, something that I really enjoyed.

Weapons are fun to use, some of them make a comeback from the previous games, while others are completely new. Leveling, progression and upgrades are all there and I really liked how they did the weapon introductions. Let’s just say, the humor in this game is on point.

Story wise Rift Apart introduces new characters and without diving into spoilers I actually really liked them, especially Rivet. All characters have arcs in this game, some better, some worse, but they didn’t feel static to me, which is good.

The rift mechanics are really impressive and overall traversal in this game is fun, I love when you can move quickly through the levels and they definitely nailed it. Puzzle sections are present and I enjoyed them quite a bit, they were never too hard but most of them weren’t too obvious as well, so I did need to spend a few minutes on them.

From the technical perspective Insomniac did an amazing job. I played on Performance RT mode that gives you limited Ray Tracing and upscaled 4K 60FPS. I didn’t notice any bugs or glitches and the game is very polished overall.

Another thing they did great is utilizing the Dual Sense features. What I mean by that is in Astro they were fun but they felt a bit too much. Here they are subtle enough that you kind of forget about them, but on the other hand are still present and add to immersion.

Adaptive triggers were more noticeable for me, but I still played with them on, because I actually really love this feature. In the beginning they were off for me for some reason and when I got my first weapon that had this half pressed / full pressed feature I didn’t get how it was supposed to work, but after checking the menu I quickly found the problem. So yeah, half presses will not really work if you play with adaptive triggers off because you have no sensitivity to when you actually made to half way point. That being said, I almost never used the half presses anyway, so it’s not a necessity.

Oh, also, they did fix that one complaint I had about the railing sections in the previous game, so that was nice to see.

Overall, I really loved this game and you should definitely play it.

Roadmap & Trophy List

Now I am actually not as happy with the trophy list as I am with the game itself, and here is why: I expected more challenge. Now, don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind when a game has an easy platinum trophy, but here it was a bit much, even by my standards, this is a AAA game after all.

I had to go out of my way for only one trophy in this entire game, other than that I just played normally. You have a couple of miscellaneous and combat trophies that I got without even trying and there is no need to complete the Challenge mode or level up more than one weapon to level 5. You don’t even need to find all the collectibles, which are on the map by the way. I mean, I did collect all of them just because, but honestly, I didn’t feel encouraged to do so in any way shape or form.

To be fair, you will have to find all the bears, spybots and crystals but I don’t know, it took me literally half an hour post game to find everything that I missed and the only collectible I used a guide for is for finding all the bears, and there is only 9 of them.

Now, the collectibles’ part I actually didn’t mind as much as the fact that I didn’t need to level up all my weapons. In Ratchet & Clank 2016 I needed to get all of them to level 10, so it forced me to use all my weapons and change my playstyle, here on the other hand you can literally use just one or two weapons in the entire game and not to care about mixing it up whatsoever. Also, the fact that the challenge mode is not required is kind of a bummer for me.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t like doing multiple playthroughs when it doesn’t make sense, but in Ratchet and Clank games it actually does. You get more powerful weapons, bolt multiplier and they are actually really fun to play, so it’s weird to me why it wasn’t required for the platinum trophy.

That being said, if you never earned a platinum trophy before it can be an amazing game to earn your first one, so I guess everything has both sides.

As for the roadmap itself, there is only 2 trophies to look out for. The first one is for killing 5 Grunthors, which are dinosaur creatures found on planet Sargasso. Now they don’t respawn, but you will have to visit this planet twice throughout the story and they reappear between those visits. As long as you don’t ignore them and kill them on your first visit, there will be more than enough. You can even farm the first one if you want and get it over with, just in case.

The other trophy is for killing 10 enemies by returning shots with the void reactor. Now, the reason you need to keep it in mind is because you will have to level up the Void Repulser to level 5 first to be able to return shots and if you upgrade it will be considerably harder, still doable though. If you upgrade this weapon you will have to target enemies much farther away, because otherwise they will die from shield blast and not projectiles. Now, because I didn’t look up the guide, I didn’t know that and upgraded it to the max, so it took me almost 40 minutes on the first combat challenge to get 10 kills this way, so keep that in mind.

Honestly all the other trophies were easy and can be done after the game and the trophy descriptions are pretty clear on the requirements.

It took me about 20 hours and almost no effort to get this platinum trophy and I would say that getting it was an enjoyable experience, I just wish there was more to it, that’s all.

Conclusions

So, should you platinum Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart?

Definitely, it is a great game with a very easy platinum trophy that literally anyone should be able to get without breaking a sweat, so if you decide to play it, and you really should by the way, you might as well add another platinum trophy to your collection.