It’s strange how quickly perception of a game genre can become affected by the platform it’s played on. In recent years, tower defense games have become synonymous with short-term distraction thanks to a myriad of browser and mobile games that took the genre out of the rarefied niche of Warcraft III mods. Ratchet & Clank: Full Frontal Assault reclaims the genre from the browser and mobile market in a way that feels both classic and new.

After a decade of regular sequels, the Ratchet & Clank series seemed to have stretched its basic mechanics as far as they could go, applying the cartoonish variety of guns and simple melee combat to big, platforming-heavy levels, online multiplayer and more. In a way, Full Frontal Assault is an attempt to go back to the roots of the series and rebuild it in another direction, one that’s not especially new but that still makes a lot of the most familiar parts of the series feel re-energized.The hands-off demo I saw at a Sony press event in New York was loosely organized around two phases of gameplay. Ratchet begins in a base with his standard blaster and a bunch of ammo boxes. You can then venture out into the level to collect the scattered weapon drops that your ship was trying to bring you before a malfunction caused them to fall in random locations. This section works a lot like a standard Ratchet and Clank level, with plenty of platforming and melee combat to build up bolts. There are ramps to use your rocket boots on, rails to grind across, and hidden nooks and caves to discover.After finding some weapons and bolts, you’ll be alerted to an incoming wave of enemies nearing your base and will have to rush back to spend your bolts on defenses. The level I saw was pretty simple to defend, with two main paths in, each a long and narrow corridor carved into a canyon. At the beginning of one we placed two standard turrets that fired automatic lasers good for big groups of weak enemies but not quite damaging enough to take care of mid-level foes.In the other corridor we laid a bit of a trap, building a forcefield barrier at the entrance to the base and surrounding it with a couple of flamethrowers. As the enemies came charging down the canyon they’d find themselves stuck in front of the forcefield, which had a beefy energy bar that needed to be depleted before it failed, all the while absorbing damage from the flamethrowers. As enemies advance, you’ll be able to chart their movement with a standard icon on the right hand side of the screen that shows how far down a particular path they are.Insomniac wants the game to be strategic but still have a sense of individual heroism, so expect to keep Ratchet active at all times. The game seems to be balanced around the idea of always having just a few more enemies on the way than can be reasonably handled by the turrets. Moment-to-moment, you’ll still be doing all of the familiar things from Ratchet & Clank: switching between weapons depending on the kind of enemy you’re fighting, managing ammo, and collecting giant bursts of bolts form exploding enemies.Like Battalion Wars and Double Fine’s Trenched, Full Frontal Assault is a combination of two familiar styles of play. But it’s telling that, after a decade of making increasingly elaborate variations on the story-driven single-player game, a series that was starting to feel a little gray around the lombax tail can be refreshed by embracing a style of play where people can tell their own stories with the tactics they’ve chosen and seeing what consequences those tactics brought. The inherent nature of tower defense adds a heavy element of time awareness, as well as adding tactical importance to different kinds of ammo. The forgiving and plentiful ammo replenishments of earlier games, which emphasized the whacky wonderment of weapons, is here an element of planning as tactically important as choosing turret types and locations.It’s sometimes too easy to be cynical about game ideas because they recall familiar formulas, nowhere truer than the hyper-rapidity with which genres oxidize in mobile and browser games. Full Frontal Assault makes a good case for the revitalizing effects that can come from viewing game ideas as all part of the same cohesive fabric, in which the beauty of the final article depends as much on the fit and tailoring as it does on the flashy newness of the fabric itself.There is no release date or price announced for Ratchet & Clank: Full Frontal Assault, but expect it to launch on PSN at a significantly lower price than the disc-standard $59.99. You can also expect more news on the game’s competitive multiplayer mode, which Insomniac promises big things from but is keeping secret for a little while longer.

Michael Thomsen used to work for IGN, but now he's a New York-based freelancer. IGN misses him, but at least we can all follow him on Twitter