I went into this game as someone who was a huge fan of the Ratchet & Clank games on the Ps2 and I absolutely loved my experience!
The idea of an Insomniac game that tried to adapt its love for varied gun gameplay with open world stylish movement worked wonderfully. I loved experimenting with the weapons, loved exploring the different locations of the city, loved the sense of chaos from fighting such large numbers of enemies... This game was a blast! It wasn't perfect, but the good vastly outweights the bad.
I approached this like I approached the R&C games where once a weapons levels up to the max I would take it out of my wheel, and that forced me to experiment with many different weapons and made the gameplay feel fresh. My favorite weapon was the murderang, which I know is a callback to a weapon from R&C A Crack in Time, but it genuinely feels like this was made for this game as it causes more damage the more you move. Other favorites included Taunt Bot, Hair Spray Bomb, Ak-FOFF, and basically all the doployables.
Even weapons that I thought I wouldn't like such as the Rager ended up being super usefull againts tank bots who have such a big health bar. Much like in Nuzzlocke where you get to appreciate your pokemon more from experimenting with them, trying out different weapons in diffrent situations makes you realize that they each have a certain use.
The game sadly doesn't have a New Game + mode but it does operate in a similar way as Ratchet Deadlocked where the story is told through missions that reward you with money once completed, and these missions can be replayed at any time (although without the reward). It is a a bit of a shame that there was no challange mode where you can play the same story in a harder difficulty.
Among the small problems I could point out there is the fact that I think having two forms of currency, one dedicated to clothing and other for... everything else, might not have been the best move. You get money much easier than you get Overcharge in this game, but OC is waaaay more important as you need it to buy weapons, maps, and amp upgrades. Personally, I would have liked if at least the upgrades could have been bought with money as well.
I also wished Overdrives, the game's system of giving you special enhancements for what you can do such as more ammo, more damage, more health, and so on,could have had more than six slots. Also, while I liked the style/amp system and loved how they brought back the mods from Deadlocked in the form of weapon amps, I wish we could have gotten more amps overall, especially for the epic section.
But overall, this was a wonderull game and a wonderfull time that I look foward to still enjoying more in the future. Loved the visuals, the combat, the sense of freedom and personalization, and loved all the attention and care for detail you can find throughout this experience.
