The universe follows a variety of specific laws that it must always abide by. Such as the four Laws of Thermodynamics. Energy can be neither created nor destroyed, everything veers towards chaos, the entropy of a system reaches a minimum the closer to absolute zero you approach and, finally, all videogame adaptations of films are bad. This is important to understand because the 2016 reboot of the Ratchet & Clank franchise, called Ratchet & Clank, is in fact an adaptation of the film that coincided with its release, also called Ratchet & Clank. In short, it’s like the old games, but also hot trash.

Ratchet & Clank: The Game: The Movie: The Game is a lesson in whiplash nostalgia. The Ratchet & Clank games of yore, Ratchet & Clank, Ratchet and Clank Going Commando and Ratchet & Clank Up Your Arsenal, were some major and defining games of my life from when I was growing up. They were almost the perfect manifestation of 2000s videogaming on the PS2. Platforming was still strong and somehow still thriving, even still dealing with a pesky third dimension, but now kids got to learn all about guns and cars and being cool. Jak & Daxter are a similar staple of this generation which also asked the question “What if traditional platforming duos, but with guns?” and both franchises hold a special place in my otherwise cold and dead heart fueled exclusively by JRPGs. So imagine my surprise when Ratchet & Clank was back, with a vengeance.

Everything that many originally loved about the games are all back once again, with a colourful HD new lick of paint. The larger than life colourful weapons are bursting back into the scene with some fan favorites such as the Sheepinator, which turns your foes into docile sheep (even tanks), the Agents of Doom Glove, which releases a swarm of small robotic friends who’ll charge into your foes and explode, as well as everyone’s favorite ballistic super weapon, the Ryno, which just launches more rockets than a Lombax should know how to handle. The weapons to play with are mostly those you may have seen before from Ratchet & Clank games but there are some new wonders to play with such as the Pixilizer, which is a shotgun that smashes the HD out of people and turns them into crude pixel sprites that crumble and fall apart, as well as the Proto Drum which is less fun, but also just as devastating as its orb projectile pulses its pink energy, killing everything in sight.

Ratchet & Clank is just as good as it’s predecessors. Combat feels chaotic and wild as you launch a plethora of weapons at a variety of aliens, robots and slimes. You’ll be swapping between weapons repeatedly as the situation calls or as you run out of ammo as the Ratchet & Clank games are always slightly a challenge of ammo management where things go south and you find yourself trying to take down an attack helicopter with your trusty wrench, instead of a massive shoulder mounted cannon. As you jump around dodging enemy fire there’ll be bolts, the currency, flying across the screen giving you an idea to how impressive your destruction is. The PS4 brings your reckless use of ballistics to a level of beauty and colour that keeps things visually stunning and you’ll keep on going back for the next explosion.

Even the segments based more around platforming have surprisingly held true to the aging process, an area of gaming that has traditionally struggled into this age of guns and duty. While they are very short, the exploration of the maps is still reminiscent of previous games with multiple paths leading down to different events and gadgets and weapons to be gained. Sadly the levels and segments feel shorter than experienced on the PS2, but that may be the nostalgia lights on full beam.

There’s still a wonderful charm to the game as the universe Ratchet & Clank is set in is rife with space corporate corruption and the way these various CEOs interact with you are wonderful as characters seem larger than life and the world seems devoid of laws or any over burdening morals. Destroying several planets to create a Frankensteinian planet is bad but general destruction and weapon vending machines that sell you a gun that changes the entire genetic make-up of someone and turns them into a sheep is perfectly fine. The whole universe of the games have a wonderfully blase attitude to health and safety and the well being of everyone around them and it’s a type of humour that it bewilders me that I still somehow managed to get it as a young pre-teen.

On the overall Ratchet & Clank is everything that a Ratchet & Clank game should be. Sure it doesn’t massively innovate and the amount of gadgets, equipment and weapons feel a little lacking in number and the whole thing just runs a little short, but the game still has the weird late 90s and early 2000s obsession with skateboards, grind shoes and being totally rad. Which is wonderful. It still, for the most part, has the cutting witticisms of the characters bouncing so perfectly against one another with each new character you bump into being as unique as the last.

And yet the game left me a little underwhelmed. The GAME aspect of Ratchet & Clank is wonderful if not short, but the thread of a story that runs through it and keeps you going ends up being wildly bad. Although, it’s not exactly the story but more so the presentation of the story. The whole idea of Ratchet & Clank the game of 2016 is that it’s a knowing adaptation of the similarly named Ratchet & Clank: The Game: The Movie (just called Ratchet & Clank). Captain Qwark retells the tale of Ratchet & Clank: The Game: The Movie as they all sit around waiting for their shipment of Ratchet & Clank: The Game: The Movie: The Game to arrive, which is their version of the game that you’re probably playing based on an in universe version of the film. Is this confusing? It’s just getting started.

As this is a self-acclaimed videogame adaptation of the movie (which is based on the game series) it follows the movie’s story to the point in which cutscenes in the game feel like they’re ripped directly from the film. This could be fine, but it isn’t as the number of scenes that actually tell a story are severely lacking. I assume that the Ratchet & Clank: The Game: The Movie movie tells a story of the original odd couple of the happy go lucky Ratchet who goes on an adventure and he’s all reckless, while Clank is a cold hard machine and tries to do things more orderly and has to learn to lighten up while Ratchet learns to take things seriously. In The Game (that’s based on the movie based on a video game) all these character building moments are gone. Ratchet and Clank barely even talk to one another. This was to the point where Ratchet panickedly asks his robot companion “What are you doing?!” to which Clank replies “Improvising.” with the camera then focusing on Ratchet’s face in an expression of realising something. In the film this is probably the moment where you realise Clank has changed as he calls back to Ratchet saying how he likes to improvise, or something. It’s a regular mechanism used in cinema. In the game there was never that original scene to call back to. There was never the discourse between the characters about chilling out or being serious. The actual story of characters has been gutted from the game and it leads to an ever increasing number of confusing segments.

The Galactic Rangers has four members, Captain Qwark, Brax, Cora and Elaris (and I had to look up most of those). Everyone knows Captain Qwark because he’s great, but the other three are never even introduced by name or face. They suddenly just appear and talk to you as if all introductions have been and passed and then further on like you’ve been there for days and they know you very well. I barely knew who any of these people were and the few cutscenes they appeared in involved fast talking briefings and then any in-game interaction involved even less. They were just mouth pieces that were there. People to fill the scenes out a little bit. There’s a moment when everyone’s running around going “OH NO VICTOR VON ION IS HERE!” and it turned out that was the angry robot at the very start of the game who never turned up ever again until near the very end, but apparently we know him by name? There’s a segment where you’re playing as Clank and he talks on the walkie talkie, “I’m getting there but Zed is trying to stop me” or something and, you may have guessed it, Zed had never appeared in the game, ever. This was the first and last moment they’d ever appeared and it turned out they were the assistant to the bad guy, but there was never an introduction. Even when you come across them in game they barely stand out from the surroundings and took me a while to realise that the thing running from me was the thing talking to me.

It annoys me so greatly as there’s so much wonder to be had in a Ratchet & Clank game and this iteration almost delivers on every single point, but just struggles with plot. Any and every side character appears for a maximum of 5 minutes, if that, before never turning up again and feels more like a knowing nod to returning players as they gleefully point at the plumber and the joke about a plumber’s ass crack that quite frankly might be lost on the hip new kids of today’s generation. In an eagerness to get to the shooty shooty bang bang parts, Ratchet & Clank ends up feeling hollow for presenting a story, but having 90% of the scenes take place off screen and aren’t ever really mentioned. Ratchet keeps on referring to Clank as “Buddy” but as far as we know they literally just met and got caught in the whirlwind of explosions that they created. At what point in their relationship did Ratchet decide to strap Clank onto his back in what could possibly be a sex thing?

The, probably, direct rip of scenes from the movie into the game also greatly disrupt the flow of the game itself. There’s a long scene where some stuff happens, but the final five seconds of it are the big revelation in which a character says “I’m sorry” and before they even finish saying that you’re in a boss battle. Scenes end so immediately that you barely get a chance to digest what a character almost said, because they probably didn’t finish it as the last syllable may have been all too quickly cut-to-blacked.

I really want to like Ratchet & Clank: The Game: The Movie: The Game, to be honest I do really like it, but, oh boy, does the movie tie-in greatly hinder this game. The witty writing and quirky characters are all still there, the bizarre universe rife with corrupt corporations that make the whole thing colourful are all there, the bright colourful weapons and gadgets are all there and even the platforming segments are all there, although quite short, the ingredients for gold are all there ready to be magic, but the recipe they’re following is that of a film and game adaptations of films have never worked and always struggled. I would love for a new Ratchet & Clank game, an original game with none of this movie nonsense. Stuffed full of everything that made these games wonderful, longer levels, more weapons, more bits and pieces and great uses of the characters. Ratchet & Clank is still a great game, but man does it feel like it’s been hard done by.