2.5/5 ★ – KQSpidey's review of Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal.

to anyone who's played the PS3 Ratchet and Clank Future games, or who may have first experienced the series through the gorgeously realized PS4 remake (or its theatrically released cutscene compilation), Up Your Arsenal is the point where the series begins to feel like itself. Fully integrated are the light RPG mechanics; making even a failed run of a level feel like a slight accomplishment, as at least one of your weapons or your health bar have gotten a little beefier. Gone are the messy, pace-destroying vehicle levels from Going Commando, which would return in the Future games finally feeling like a core feature rather than an unfortunate afterthought (seriously, I gave up playing Going Commando ~twice~, because the spaceship levels were so immediately un-fun I reckoned the rest of the game could not possibly be good enough to warrant my continued frustration). Created in the synthesis of what worked in the previous two games is an undeniably "fun", unstoppably run-and-gun series of filling progress bars and checked boxes. filling these bars and checking these boxes suffices as a good enough experience to occupy half of your brain while the other half listens to a podcast, hums along to music it already likes, or talks to a friend on Discord about Marvel movies, or how the season 2 finale of The Mandalorian was "dope as hell, dude" don't get me wrong, I like games this mindless! we all need them, if we're to do any of that other stuff in the background. if it weren't for Ratchet and Clank: Up Your Arsenal, maybe I could have spent that half-brained energy doing the dishes, or cleaning out the back of my car. and, to its credit, if I really pushed myself, I'm sure I could have gotten invested enough in the Saturday morning cartoon story to get a chuckle out of a few lines of dialogue here and there (that is, at least up until the final boss, where—in classic Ratchet and Clank fashion—the designers decided that the key to difficult enemy design is to give them all the health and all the damage buffs they could, and hope that nobody'd notice. at that point I don't think even my best efforts could have kept me distracted from R&C's necessarily monotonous design). far be it from me to discount this game and all the work of its developers, writers, and voice cast as "bad", it's just not all that interesting. they certainly put a whole lot more work into making it than I did playing it and writing this review. if one day I am lucky enough to feature on the voice cast of a game some overly opinionated twenty-something loser on a "letterboxd for games" calls "not all that interesting", I'd have good reason to have a lot more pride in myself. as it stands I, a twenty-something loser on a "letterboxd for games", pridelessly poured an obscene amount of hours into Ratchet and Clank: Up Your Arsenal. I did so while lucky enough to be at home with family during a holiday season hijacked by the coronavirus. I did so instead of spending those many hours with that family, so my ambivalence has perhaps a sharper point that it would have otherwise. in any case, it was engaging enough to vacuum up those hours of my life, so who's the real sucker? I say all this knowing, just as I know I will have to load my dishwasher tonight and do my laundry later this week, that when I finally do get a PS5 one of the first games I'll play through 100% is Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart. oh well. we are all subject to busywork until we die. sometimes that busywork is given a veneer shiny enough to distract from the things that really matter. this particular busywork has a gun that transforms alien monsters into funny exploding animals. this particular busywork won, and will win again, and I have to live with that.