Yea, to be honest the new game has left a bad taste in my mouth. One of my favourite things about the R&C series has always been how I could immerse myself in the world through likeable and funny characters, and interesting plots and worlds, all with very good presentation and animation. It's always been pretty consistent.
This new game has poor story structure, hurt by trying to tie into the movie, and this is a shame because I actually always really admired the character development of R&C over the first game, and Qwark over the original 3. It's a real shame to see them have a reestablished origin story as weak as this.
I mean, they clearly have't forgotten how to continue with the good gameplay design, and nice graphics. Although the map designs I found to be really at their best when they were most similar to the original, because really, that did have pretty good level designs.
We've seen this sort of poor animation before with character interactions in ToD and ACiT, but then it was worse, and more forgivable. Because back then there were plenty of cutscenes that were well animated with much larger plot significance, and those games had a very different focus from the original. The original game's story was mostly coming from he interactions between Ratchet & Clank and some NPC, and a lot of life wen't into this. I miss it, and I know the classic Insomniacs do too. I mean just look at Insomniac's stream of Ratchet & Clank (PS2), where Ted Price just can't help get exited at watching all the NPC scenes. He really likes them.
And I really hate saying this, as it makes me sound like such a downer, but... I just didn't find anything in this game funny. cringy at times, yes. But not a good cringe like the UK Office. The humour is just so different now, but I don't think they'll shift it back anytime soon. For now, I just have my hopes set in the next game having much better story and characters. That'll do.
