Ratchet and Clank has been a strong series on the PlayStation platform for years. The first foray on the PS3, Tools of Destruction, was both a retail and critical success. Quest for Booty follows up on R&C Future with the series’ first episodic portion on the PlayStation Network. Does the bite-sized Ratchet feel the same as the full games? Unfortunately, the answer is yes and no.

The graphics in Quest for Booty are fantastic. You’ll see the same level of visuals as seen in Tools of Destruction. You get almost Pixar quality in a smaller downloadable form. The sound works great as well, just as in the previous title. Insomniac did a great job of condensing all the wonderful eye and ear candy of a full retail game into a PSN download.

The gameplay mechanics are very much similar to Tools of Destruction as well. Most of the weapons make a return, although you start off from scratch with your leveling up. With the game only taking about four hours to complete, you don’t get enough time to fully explore the leveling abilities of each weapon. It would have been nice for Quest for Booty to read your game save from Tools of Destruction and let you use your weapon levels from the full game, with Booty being a continuation of Destruction. Either way, you still get to blow stuff up. The only addition is using the new Kinetic ability of Ratchet’s wrench to maneuver objects in the environment. You can pull down various platforms to open up new walkways or compress springs to load them for jumps. It’s a very nice addition that I hope gets fully explored in the next edition of Ratchet and Clank.

Where the game falls short is the expected humor and character interaction. The game starts off where Tools of Destruction left off, so Clank has gone missing. Right off the bat, you lose that Ratchet and Clank interaction factor that you get through the entire game otherwise. Captain Quark is also absent, so his one liners don’t give you that chuckle ever now and then either. Insomniac did a decent job of making the new secondary and tertiary characters have quick funny lines, but they’re too few and far between. It may sound small, but this really changes the feel of what you expect from a Ratchet and Clank game.

Quest for Booty has solid gameplay (the boss battles are terrific), but the changed feel you get from the game doesn’t draw you in like you would expect from the series. You get a solid game for $15 and it will serve fans of the series well, but it ends up leaving even more questions than Tools of Destruction. With another Ratchet coming in 2009, this will serve to hold you over.

Overall: 7.5 out of 10

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