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Everybody's favorite Lombax is back for another installment in the Ratchet and Clank series. Ratchet and Clank Future: A Crack in Time picks up where Quest for Booty left off and thankfully, all of the insane shooting, platforming and puzzle solving came with it.

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Ratchet and Clank spend the game apart, with each character relegated to their game types. Ratchet's portions mostly consist of shooting and platforming while the Clank portions are more puzzle-based. The action is intense, with swarms of enemies to aim your wild weapons at. The platforming is solid and Ratchet controls fairly well.

The camera seems a bit on the slow side and can be a liability at times but it's still serviceable overall. The controls hold up fairly well but can take some getting use to due to some redundant buttons and unintuitive button combinations to perform certain tasks. In the heat of battle, it can be a chore to get to the weapon you want.

Clank's scenarios are fun and use a very cool time-shifting gimmick. Essentially, you use future/past versions of yourself performing certain actions in order to solve puzzles. It can be a bit intimidating at first but once you have five Clanks populating the screen it becomes very satisfying to solve the mindbenders.

A Crack in Time doesn't reinvent the wheel (or maybe it's more like the bolt?) when it comes to what works in the R & C series. A Crack in Time features great shooting action with a plethora of unique and fantastic weapons. Weapons from the previous games reappear, but A Crack In Time features some wonderful new toys to Ratchet's arsenal, such as the Sonic Eruptor (an alien attached to a trigger which causes it to belt out its destructive mating call) and the Tesla Spikes, a trap weapon where you plant multiple spikes and then link them with an electrical current.

The weapons are wildly creative and can set up some pretty interesting combos. You purchase them by collecting bolts from enemies and from the stages. Bolt gathering becomes wildly addictive as you're always looking to have enough to buy the new weapons as soon as they become available. Meanwhile, your 'Constructo' weapons can be tweaked, upgraded, and coloured, which adds a great level of customization that can be lacking in some action platformers. You end up with a Ratchet that suits your playstyle. Along with the large amount of weapons, you also get various tools to help you in your quest to save your robotic buddy. Items like the hover boots open up the gameplay and add some nice dimensions to the game.

The mission layout gives you a degree of freedom as you travel via spaceship to different planets to progress the story. Along the way, you can do some Galaga-inspired shooting against enemy ships. These sequences are fine, but it's the Ratchet sequences that are the main show. You can take detours for side missions and they provide some additional fun if you don't want to blow through the story too quickly.

Presentation is absolutely phenomenal. The in-game graphics are vibrant and look fantastic. The visuals, voice acting, and scripting is spot on and races with great comedic timing. Everything has a sort of Pixar-esque edge to it: a sublime balance of a child's imagination with adult sensibility and humour. The humorous animated instructional videos for your new weapons are worth the price of admission alone.

Online modes are unfortunately non-existent. The only online component to the game is a leaderboard that keeps track of various stats, like wrench kills and how long it took someone to complete the game. It's an anemic offering and it's too bad that there wasn't some sort of online competitive multiplayer to really take advantage of the game's wacky weapons.

A Crack in Time is a great installment to an already excellent franchise. Every aspect of the game combines beautifully together, from the amazing weapons to the surprisingly fun time-based puzzles. Add in some Pixar-quality writing and CG and you have yourself one of the best platformers in the galaxy.

Ratchet and Clank Future: A Crack in Time is out now for the PS3.

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