Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart

My first hour with Rift Apart on PC had me quietly resenting every year I spent assuming this was "just a console thing." Insomniac built a third-person action-platformer that ping-pongs between eight distinct worlds, throws an arsenal of genuinely weird weapons at you, and asks almost nothing in the way of prior series knowledge to follow along. You play as both Ratchet and the alternate-dimension newcomer Rivet, switching between them as the story splits the pair across realities. Weapon upgrades carry over between the two characters via the Raritanium system, so every bolt you hoover up and every crate you smash feeds a shared progression loop that keeps the pacing tight from first planet to last. The combat is the standout. Ranged and melee mix with rift-jumping, rail-grinding, and the Rift Tether, a new traversal tool that zips you across a battlefield or through a dimensional portal in an instant. Guns range from the Blast Pistol to the Negatron Collider, and most have a secondary firing mode toggled by a short versus long button press on PC (an adaptation from the DualSense's adaptive triggers, which did that job more elegantly on PS5). The Drillhound's lock-on feels slightly off without a proper haptic trigger, but it's a minor gripe in a sandbox that otherwise rewards you for swapping weapons constantly rather than spamming one favourite. Boss design holds up for most of the runtime, though the final few fights lean on repetition a bit more than the rest. The PC port, handled by Nixxes Software, is genuinely solid. DLSS 3, FSR 2, Intel XeSS, and ultrawide support up to triple-monitor configs are all present. An NVMe SSD is strongly recommended, the game's signature rift-hopping sequences were engineered around the PS5's fast storage, and while a modern NVMe gets close to the console experience, SATA SSDs and HDDs will introduce noticeable pauses that undercut the spectacle. At launch there were some crash reports and a cutscene audio-sync bug, most of which patches addressed quickly. At the time of writing, 91% of Steam reviewers rate it positively across over 17,000 reviews, which is about as strong a long-term signal as you can ask for. The honest caveat is length. Expect roughly 10 to 15 hours for a standard playthrough, with collectible hunting and challenge modes adding some extra loops. This is not a sprawling open-world game and makes no attempt to be one. The story is warm, the voice acting is excellent (Rivet in particular earns her place alongside the original duo), and the writing avoids the kind of cringe that sinks a lot of all-ages sci-fi. If you are a dedicated PC-only player, know that Rift Apart is the ninth mainline series entry, the back catalogue is not on PC, but the game is written to be accessible to newcomers, and the dimensional-rift story framing means the lack of history does not really hurt you. For pure-PC players who have never touched a Ratchet title, this is a clean, confident entry point at a visual quality that still holds up. For everyone else: if you want a game that does one thing, kinetic, weapon-variety-heavy action across gorgeously weird alien worlds, exceptionally well, this is it.

Alex · Scout Team

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