Ratchet & Clank Rift Apart PC review: Near perfection in PC port masterclass

While fighting one of Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart’s many end-of-level bosses, I’m violently pulled through a series of dimension rifts, each spitting me out in a brand new planet - nay, dimension - to fight in. Each new location is vastly different in design; from its colour palette and design to the wildlife that inhabits it, I feel like I’m on the world's most extravagant rollercoaster ride - and it’s all done without a single loading screen in sight.

This is the technological promise that Insomniac Games delivered with the PS5 version of Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart back in 2021, and the studio is back to pass it over into the hands of PC players. 

PlayStation to PC ports have had an especially rough time of it recently, with The Last of Us Part 1 barely running on even the most high-end of machines. Thankfully, Ratchet and Clank is easily one of the best PC ports we’ve seen in a while, even outshining the likes of cross-platform games from earlier in the year. 

To boot, the game beneath the technical specs is an all-timer, too, making Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart a firm contender for your 2023 backlog.

• Here are the system requirements for Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart on PC

Setting the example for PC ports

Let’s get the PC-specific talk out of the way first - Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart absolutely shines on PC. A whole host of graphical options let players tweak the settings to suit even fairly low-end specs, with every option you’d come to expect on display. There’s even a FOV slider - a rare occurrence for a third-person shooter, but most certainly welcome.

If you’re someone who enjoys playing PC games at funky resolutions, you’re also in luck. When tested on a 21:9 widescreen monitor, Ratchet & Clank scaled perfectly to show more on the left and right of the screen, with UI elements relocating accordingly. As cutscenes are all rendered in-game, these are displayed perfectly too, aside from a few segments where a 16:9 video element plays.

As for performance, I was able to lock in a solid 70-90fps at all times with an RTX 3080 and i9-10900K. This was with the settings cranked all the way up but with Ray Tracing disabled. While RT was a fun experiment to turn on for a bit, I never once found myself thinking that the visuals in Ratchet & Clank were lacking without traced reflections or shadows.

Controls map well to the mouse and keyboard, too, with every button function feeling natural to press. The only downside here is that you’re losing out on the specifically designed haptic feedback of the DualSense controller, which is regularly referenced in the tutorial videos for each of the weapons. However, you can connect a DualSense controller to your PC and it will work just as it does on the PlayStation 5 version of the game.

Seeing through the Prestige

The only downside of the PC port arises when utilising the game’s signature feature - travelling through dimensional portals with no load screens. On PlayStation 5, these work seamlessly with Insomniac only having one hardware configuration to design for. 

With PC, that’s a different story. Insomniac mostly manages to pull off the illusion, but even with the game installed on an SSD, it’s possible to catch the game hitching for half a second while it loads in the next dimension during portal jumps.

It’s a super minor hiccup that only pulls you out of the magic trick for a second. What’s more, the hiccup will totally depend on your hardware configuration. Install Ratchet & Clank on an m.2 SSD, and the minor hitches might disappear entirely.

However, it’s worth noting that this issue occurred on a relatively high-speed SSD, and would almost certainly occur if the game were to be installed on a mechanical hard drive. If you’re looking to play this new-gen game, you’d best have a new-gen PC to back it up.

Move over, Pixar

Once you’ve got the visuals dialled in on your PC, it’s highly unlikely that you’ll ever look back. Ratchet & Clank is one of the best-looking games I’ve seen displayed on my monitor, ever. Even without Ray Tracing, the ridiculously diverse environments pop with colour and enthuse energy that only Insomniac can seem to pump into its games. It’s a visual feast.

Whether the camera is up close and personal with a character, or overlooking a vast vista that you’re about to explore, the game constantly feels like you’re playing a pre-rendered animated movie. With a frame rate that manages to keep up with the breakneck pace of both the gameplay and the story, you’re left rarely wanting to take a break from the action during the eight hours it takes to finish the campaign.

• We included Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart on our list of best games of 2021

PG DOOM

Much of the gameplay is made up of a riveting combat system (pun intended) that sees our protagonist continually invest in new wild and wacky weapons. It seems that the game wants to throw a new weapon or mechanic at your every 20 minutes or so, and the tried and tested upgrade system keeps old weapons fresh, exciting, and viable all the way to the very end.

In those combat scenarios, Ratchet and Rivet can roam around arenas at absurd speeds, aided further by a set of rocket-powered boots that’s picked up a short while into the story. All the while, a mammoth amount of munitions is at your disposal, each with its own strength and weakness against certain enemies.

The best comparisons can actually be made to the modern DOOM reboots, which feature a remarkably similar combat loop of taking out enemies strategically while taking into account movement and ammo management. Of course, it’s all wrapped up in a family-friendly art style, but the crux of it is essentially the same, in the best way possible.

In a rare mark on the Ratchet & Clanks reputation, it does start to fall flat in its boss fights during the latter half of the game. The same boss fight is re-used far more times than I’d like to recount, which means you get used to dodging the same attacks over and over again. To make matters worse, the boss isn’t actually that interesting to fight, either, with the strategy simply coming down to firing at it as much as you can.

Perfect pacing

Of course, Ratchet & Clank games are also about the journey that its protagonists go on - and what a journey this one is. Zipping between different dimensions, our fluffy and shiny heroes are on a quest to stop Dr Nefarious from taking over the dimensions, whose motivations are about as comical as you’d expect for a game like this.

On their way, the duo meet Rivet and Kit, essentially their parallel universe’s doppelgangers. The dynamic between these four characters is a joy to watch as they continue to learn new things about themselves from each other. There are a few predictable story tropes in here, but nothing too offensive.

As the player, you end up playing as both Ratchet and Rivet at different points of the story, with missions selected from your spaceship. These can be done in slightly different orders, but ultimately all reach the same endpoint.

The pace at which these missions go by is rapid, which serves both the gameplay and the story delightfully. You could easily play through these missions as episodes of a TV series, with each chapter exploring a new planet with an entirely different locale and set of side characters. However, this is most certainly an experience that’s best binged.

Throughout the entire runtime, dialogue is written to a delightful quality. Both the antagonists and companions are written so wittily that you’ll want to stick around with them just to hear what comes out of their mouths next. While mostly aimed at younger audiences, there were a few jokes with a wicked sense of humour that had me fully cracking up in my seat.

• If you want to know what happens at the end of Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, here's our ending explained piece

The Verdict

Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart is a triumph on PC and should set an example for how ports should be - not just for PlayStation games, but for every other game on the platform, too.

The game wrapped up in the port is very close to perfect, too. After finishing the main story, I’m still aching to go back to grabbing collectables, zipping around the planets and mashing enemies with ridiculous weaponry at the same time.

Boss design can get a little stale in the closing stages, and the illusion of dimension jumping is broken slightly on even relatively powerful PC specs. However, there’s no doubt that Rift Apart is a must-play on PC if you haven’t had the pleasure of trying it on PlayStation yet.

4.5/5

Reviewed on PC. Code provided by the publisher.