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Following Cyberpunk 2077’s botched launch I’ve approached most new games with a increased hesitation. If it looks too good to be true, it probably is, right? So when we saw Insomniac Games’ Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart for the first time, my guard was up. It really looked like you were playing a Pixar movie, but I still had a hard time trusting the final experience.
After spending a few weeks with Rift Apart, I can confirm it genuinely lives up to the hype. It’s a visual spectacle that’s light-years beyond anything we’ve seen in consoles or even most PC games. While we’ve seen some games tap into the power of the PS5, like Spider-Man: Miles Morales, Demon’s Souls and Returnal, Rift Apart is even more technically impressive, not to mention more accessible than those last two punishing games. It pushes technology like ray tracing to new heights, allowing for realistic reflections and shadows. And it takes advantage of the PS5’s speedy SSD, letting you hop between completely different worlds in an instant.
What’s even more impressive is that Rift Apart is able to deliver its ridiculously detailed assets at lightning-fast speeds. It takes around 10 seconds to start playing the game after launching it — there’s more of a delay for mandatory studio logo screens than actually loading the game. And since everything is being rendered in-engine, there’s no delay between cutscenes and gameplay either. You’ll also hop across multiple planets, in addition to rifts, without any visible load times too. Rift Apart even brings in some cinematic language, includingStar Wars-like wipe transitions between scenes, to show off how smooth its load times can be. (The latter is particularly astounding, since the PS5’s memory has to hold everything you can see in those wipes at the same time.)
Much like the pack-in game Astro’s Playroom, Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart uses every aspect of Sony’s DualSense controller wisely. The adaptive triggers make every weapon feel a bit different: shooting with the Drillhound, for example, requires locking onto enemies by pressing the right trigger down half-way. That’s something the Ricochet gun doesn’t need, though, so you can just click down all the way to start juggling enemies with its pinball-like ammo. I even appreciated the more subtle haptic features, like the way the controller gently rumbles as Ratchet and Rivet walk across different surfaces. The more I played this game, the more disappointed I became with Microsoft’s Xbox Series X controller, which didn’t change much from the Xbox One.
Even though I found a lot to love about the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 when they launched, both Microsoft and Sony are still in a transition phase more than six months later. There aren’t a ton of new games for these consoles, so most players are settling for slightly better performance in cross-generation titles like Assassin’s Creed Valhalla. Sony is doing the better job of pushing out next-generation exclusives, though. Sorry, Microsoft, The Medium isn’t enough. And now with Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, the PlayStation 5 has its first genuine masterpiece.

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