Insomniac Games‘ Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart was highly regarded as one of the best games for PlayStation 5 back when it was released in 2021 thanks to its clever use of that system’s best features, the SSD, by having the universe’s most famous Lombax and his robotic pal shift through dimensions at the blink of an eye.
Now, a couple of years down the line, in Sony’s effort to bring their biggest releases to PC, Rift Apart was brought over to Steam, and I couldn’t be happier with the end result. This is by far the best optimization of the bunch, following an already impressive job done with Returnal back in February.
Not only is it a fantastic port, Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart just happens to be an amazing game on its own, the best entry in the series to date, which is honestly saying a lot since Ratchet & Clank has always been the highest bar to reach ever since the franchise debuted back on PlayStation 2.
Our friends were just ready to take in the laurels of their heroics deeds during a parade in their honor when their arch nemesis, Nefarious, decided to crash the party and steal Clank’s gift to Ratchet, a portal gun, which was supposed to be used so Ratchet would be able to find other Lombaxes that might be living in other dimensions.
The resulting chaos ends up getting the trio through a portal to a dimension where all signs point to a place where Nefarious has indeed managed to win, becoming the evil emperor. Truth be told, for as incompetent as that guy tends to be, he in fact’s done a decent job at building a whole metropolis in his image.
But it wouldn’t be fair for him to be the only power at play, no, in that dimension there happens to be a Lombax that isn’t Ratchet, and it’s up to our newly arrived friends to figure out just what the heck is going on.
But wait! Clank ends up getting split from his pal Ratchet, and the mysterious girl manages to save him from the clutches of Nefarious’ goons. All the while, a hapless Ratchet watches from afar, uselessly trying to call out to his friend, and this, my friends, is where the adventure begins.
This PC port of Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart runs at a native 4K, and if you’ve got a computer capable of running at that resolution, the game can easily be among one of the best looking available on the market. In terms of what I’ve got under the hood of my personal rig, it’s a tad older and thus less than capable of such, but even at 1080p, Rift Apart looks damn DAMN fine.
Thanks to my GeForce 3060ti graphics card I’ve able to run the game with all settings ticked to high, and it ran like butter regardless of all the mayhem going on. Similar to Returnal, the new Ratchet & Clank makes brilliant use of the DualSense controller, so if you’ve got one of those lying around, be sure to use it with this port. The haptic rumble works flawlessly and I’m absolutely in love with the trigger resistance when using the game’s insane weapons.
Finally digging into Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart has been a whole lot of fun, and I’m especially impressed with just how well the game is performing on my admittedly aging machine, in so far that I’m really looking forward to finishing the game after this review. As it stands, it’s easily Sony’s finest job as a port and it’s an exciting prospect for future conversions we are very likely to get moving forward.
