New York Comic Con is still largely dominated by movies, television and – you guessed it – comics. But games are growing in stature at Manhattan’s yearly fall gathering, and this was no more evident than at Sony’s NYCC get-together. There, they showed off the likes of The Last of Us and PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale, big names that demand a lot of attention. But there were smaller titles being shown too, and strangely cast in a corner was the newest Ratchet & Clank game, Full Frontal Assault.

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Ryan Clements Says…

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Colin Moriarty says…

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Upon playing Full Frontal Assault, the two IGN game editors that made the trip to New York City – Colin Moriarty and Ryan Clements – became quite excited. So excited, in fact, that they both have something to say about the Insomniac’s soon-to-be-released game. So why limit this preview to one editor?Ratchet & Clank has always encouraged personalized destruction. The shimmering armory of weapons, the awe-inspiring gadgets -- these tools serve the same ultimate purpose of promoting mayhem but do so with a different look and feel. Players tailor the destruction to suit their tastes. Ratchet & Clank: Full Frontal Assault continues this tradition, but adds a level of strategy entirely new to the series.The incorporation of tower defense elements to the Ratchet formula is like adding a new piece to a game of chess. It not only adds a new avenue for strategic thinking, but enhances and complicates the pre-existing player choices that came from weapon selection and character upgrades. This is especially true when two players face off in the competitive multiplayer modes.With a battlefield composed of two rival bases and a number of nodes in between, Full Frontal Assault immediately asks you a number of important questions: how do you traverse the terrain? What will you use to defend your base? How will you attack your opponent's base? Will you stay behind and help the defensive or offensive efforts of your "team?"The play is broken into several phases to help you answer these questions in steps. The Recon phase gives the rival players a chance to explore the battlefield and capture nodes which, once controlled, provide bolts to the owner over time. These bolts then fund the rest of your war efforts.The Squad phase calls for you to spend those bolts on base defense and attacking squads. Here's where that player choice, and the accompanying strategy, really opens up. Do you spend your bolts on barriers to keep enemy squads out? Do you build turrets to attack the opposition? Perhaps you'll even upgrade your own weapons to better defend the base generators that your opponent wants to wipe out.You could even go for an all-out assault and send wave upon wave of automated squads crashing down on your rival. But then your own base would be left unprotected.The Assault phase brings all your choices to fruition. Once it begins, the attack commences and you're free to contribute to the fight in whatever way you see fit.With so many different weapons and upgrades to consider on your character alone, the potential strategies just waiting to be unleashed from turret arrangement, squad composition, and barrier building means you have an intoxicating number of choices to make. The crew at developer Insomniac has been playing Full Frontal Assault for more than a hot minute and is still uncovering new strategies to this day.Considering how enjoyable a single match was with very little knowledge of its strategic subtleties, playing through Full Frontal Assault threatens us with an entirely new addiction to add to our list of vices.Ryan hit beautifully on all of the points that make Full Frontal Assault so enjoyable. Its strategic nature is deceivingly deep – at least in the portion of the game we saw -- and it manages to stay true to the Ratchet & Clank license we’ve all grown to love over the past decade. And it’s that simple feat, its ability to be a true Ratchet game even when it’s not what you’ve come to expect from the franchise, that stood out to me the most.I couldn’t help but note time and time again while playing how bold of a step Full Frontal Assault is for the franchise. The last Ratchet & Clank game, All 4 One, is perhaps the first game in the extensive series that was outright divisive, and even panned in some sectors. All 4 One was a decidedly different game than what came before it and emphasized new features and tricks that fans of the series didn’t necessarily want. But All 4 One’s slanted reception didn’t scare Insomniac Games into doing something safe. It encouraged them to do something even more different, even more radically off the beaten path, and frankly, it seems like they’ve struck gold.Out of all of the games at Sony’s event, Full Frontal Assault was the one I had the most outright fun with. Its Competitive Mode is easy to learn, yet it will clearly be difficult to master. Wrapping one’s head around the phases of the game that Clements outlined takes only a couple of matches, but figuring out what you may want to specifically accomplish in each phase is another story entirely. With endless amounts of custom game settings and tweaks players can make, Full Frontal Assault promises to be a deep game with extensive replay value.Sure, there’s a campaign with its own story, and other parts of the game – including that campaign – can be played with another player or alone. But the meat of the game, and what will keep players coming back for more, will undoubtedly prove to be its emphasis on competition. And it’s a feature so unexpected to find in a Ratchet & Clank game that it simply makes it that much more appealing and notable.Like previous Ratchet games, Full Frontal Assault will come with a litany of Skill Points to uncover and collectibles to find. Skill Points in particular tie into the options you’ll ultimately be able to unlock as you play with your friends, much like Skill Points unlocked special movies and concept art in previous games. So there’s a level of familiarity in Full Frontal Assault that will woo Ratchet fans in, even those who may still have a sour taste in their mouth from All 4 One.But it’s hard not to go back to the obvious: Insomniac Games wants to try new things, even if some new things don’t work out quite as well as expected. And Full Frontal Assault, in all of its single player, cooperative and competitive glory, seems to set a new, more successful course for the studio’s most famous franchise. The fact that the game plays and saves seamlessly across PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Vita (and that you get one free for buying the other) is simply icing on the cake.Insomniac and Sony refused to give us a firm release date or price for Full Frontal Assault, but they promised that it will be coming to a PS3 or Vita (or both!) near you very soon.

Colin Moriarty is an IGN PlayStation editor. You can follow him on Twitter (@notaxation) and IGN (Moriarty-IGN) and learn just how sad the life of a New York Islanders and New York Jets fan can be.Ryan Clements writes for IGN. He loves the Ratchet series, even though he started a little late, and still gets misty thinking about the ending of A Crack in Time. Follow him on Twitter (@PwamCider) and IGN (Clements-IGN)