Reviewed: August 30, 2008
Reviewed by: Mark Smith

Publisher
Sony Computer Entertainment

Developer
Insomniac Games

Released: August 21, 2008
Genre: Action
Players: 1

9
10
9
6
8.9

Supported Features:

Ratchet & Clank Future: Quest for Booty is a small episode that fills in a bit of the story between the last game and the next. Episodic content is nothing new. The Xbox 360 is experiment with the delivery system with games like Grand Theft Auto and Tomb Raider, and the PS3 has the Siren: Blood Curse multi-part series. But it’s one thing to get you hooked on serial content and another to offer you a single chapter then tell you that you have to wait until 2009 to find out what happens.

So while Clank is living out the life of a secret agent on the PSP, Ratchet is fulfilling his pirate fantasies in Quest for Booty. Taking up a nominal 2.4GB of your hard drive, Quest for Booty forgoes the fancy CG movies and cutscenes and opts for some stylish storyboard narratives as told by one of the pirate henchmen. In fact, it’s not until the end of the adventure that you realize the entire game you’ve been playing is a retelling of a story in a book of pirate lore.

You’ll quickly meet up with the mayor who is eager to help you provided you can help him. The first order of business is to repair several high-tech windmills scattered about the island to restore power. Each windmill offers unique challenges to reach the top and turn the bolt required to extend the blades. The first few towers are merely platform puzzles with ledge jumps and magnetic paths that will create some serious vertigo. Later, you will need to perform amazing feats of acrobatics and some rail slides just to reach the towers.

Once you have fixed things up on the island you set sail for the legendary pirate caves where you unwitting unleash a ghost pirate who immediately attacks the island you just came from. You’ll need to defend that island as well as visiting another island that is home to an amazing pirate secret and plenty of traps and puzzles including mixing cocktails and playing a giant pipe organ.

Ratchet, or rather his wrench has a few new tricks in this new adventure starting with the Kinetic Tether. This allows you to connect your wrench to distant objects and slide them toward you or pull them down, or whatever. It’s a clever concept that is seamlessly integrated into the puzzle design. The other new feature your wrench now possesses is the ability to hold items starting with lava rocks that can be thrown to blow up barriers, and later you can grab this green slugs that will glow in the dark, thus lighting your way through sinister pirate caves.

You begin the game with many of the weapons you had at the end of Tools of Destruction, and they are even leveled-up a bit for you, but they are almost immediately removed from your inventory and then slowly trickled back into your possession throughout the game. You’ll have everything back by the final boss fight – don’t worry. The enemy design is rather limited but they come at you in great numbers often forcing you to change up your tactics from melee to ranged combat. Some monsters are light sensitive and can be repelled with a glowing slug in your wrench.

There are no arena battles and you don’t get to switch over to Clank – remember; he’s missing, but he does appear in some Ben Kenobi-style visions. You do partner up with a female acquaintance for some levels but you neither control her nor are responsible for her wellbeing. It’s a straight, single-player linear game design all about the action and puzzles and telling a missing piece of a much larger story.

The intermissions are all handled with in-game cutscenes, and the major story points between chapters are told as an animated storybook with artistic icons moving about a gorgeously detail pirate map. There is a lot of subtle detail in this map as well as every part of this game’s design and overall look. Quest for Booty only supports 720p, but it still looks amazing and I can’t imagine it looking that much better if it did support 1080p.

During those rare moments of silence you are left to bask in the awesomeness of the exotic environment, the sounds of wildlife, the wind, the water, the explosions and the clatter of nuts and bolts…it’s all there and in glorious Dolby Digital. Every weapon and every gadget comes with its own clever and original sound.

The voice cast is amazing and everyone plays their parts to perfection, full of life and plenty of humor. As always, you’ll want to eavesdrop whenever possible, and the island folk will even treat you differently and say new stuff after you help them out. Of course all the infighting and banter between the pirates will have you rolling on the floor.

It took me about 16 hours to finish Tools of Destruction so doing the math, this game is priced exactly right for the amount of content and gameplay you’ll get. Sadly, there is no replay value but that is still no reason not to replay the game just for the pure joy of it, and those rail slides are always worth a second ride.