Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart

A dazzling dimension-hopping showcase that's pure joy from the first minute

Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart is the game I reach for when I do not want to wind down, I want to wake back up. Most of what I play after bedtime is quiet and meditative. This is the opposite. It is loud, fast, colourful and grinning from ear to ear, and somehow that is exactly what some evenings call for.

Insomniac poured real craft into this and it shows in every frame. You are thrown between crumbling dimensions, chased by a wonderfully petty villain, and handed the most creative arsenal in gaming, all while a brand new hero quietly steals the whole show. It is a big, generous, joyful blockbuster, and it still fits into the windows I actually have.

Dimension-Hopping Mayhem

The headline trick is the rifts. Mid-fight, mid-jump, the world tears open and you are yanked into a completely different dimension with barely a flicker of a loading screen. The first time it happens it feels like a magic trick. By the tenth time it is just how the game moves, and it never stops being fun.

Then there are the weapons, which are the real reason I kept coming back. The arsenal is genuinely hilarious and wildly diverse, and there is never just one right way to deal with a room full of bad guys. You can turn them all into a hedge with the Topiary Sprinkler, drop a Groovitron that forces everything on screen to dance, or reach for something heavier and sillier when a fight gets serious. Half the fun is simply rummaging through the toy box to see what each new gadget does. Combat and traversal are both snappy and responsive, the kind of moment-to-moment feel that makes a controller hard to put down.

The boss battles are a highlight too. They are big, spectacular set pieces, but crucially they are fun without ever tipping into the sort of controller-throwing difficulty I have no patience for late at night. You get the spectacle and the satisfaction without the frustration.

An Art Style That Still Holds Up

This is not a brand new game, but you would honestly never know it to look at it. Rift Apart leans on art direction rather than raw horsepower, and that is exactly why it has aged so gracefully. The worlds burst with colour and personality, the character animation has a real Pixar-grade charm, and every planet carries its own strong visual identity. Set it next to anything releasing today and it stands its ground without a single excuse.

It helps that the whole thing stays so clean and readable in motion. Everything from the shimmer of a fresh dimension to the chaos of a busy firefight holds together beautifully, and it scales happily to whatever your hardware can throw at it. Best of all, on a decent SSD the load times are effectively gone, which matters more than it sounds when your play sessions are short. There is no waiting, no dead air, just straight back into it.

Rivet, Clank & a Story with Heart

I did not expect to care as much as I did about Rivet. She is a fantastic new lead, given real weight and personality, and she carries her half of the game every bit as well as Ratchet carries his. The story around the two of them is light and breezy rather than deep, but it is warm, genuinely funny, and never outstays its welcome. The humour lands far more often than it has any right to, and the villain is an absolute highlight. He is a preening, self-obsessed egomaniac who gives off serious Mojo Jojo from The Powerpuff Girls energy, all grand ranting and wounded pride, and I was grinning through most of his scenes.

It is also easy to recommend around kids. With its low age rating, the tone is bright and heroic, and the violence is cartoonish and bloodless. My daughter loved watching it as much as I loved playing it, which does not happen with everything on my shelf.

How It Fits After Bedtime

Here is my one honest caveat, and it is the reason this lands at a very high score rather than a perfect one. This is not a wind-down game. It is exciting, adrenal, sometimes genuinely hectic, and if you are hoping to feel sleepy afterwards you are playing the wrong thing.

What it does have is structure that respects a busy dad's time. Checkpoints are frequent and forgiving, the game is broken into planets and missions you can tackle one at a time, and there is no punishing fail state waiting to slap you for stopping when a little voice calls out. I could drop in for a single mission, get my dose of colourful chaos, and step away without losing anything. For a game this big, that is exactly the flexibility I need.

Final Dad Verdict

Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart is a joyful, gorgeous, endlessly inventive blockbuster that never made me feel like I needed a twenty-hour runway to enjoy it. The weapons are a delight, Rivet is a brilliant addition, and it is one of the finest-looking games I have ever put in front of my daughter.

Just go in knowing what it is. If you want something calming to close out the day, look elsewhere. But if you want twenty minutes of pure, grinning, dimension-hopping fun to reward yourself with after the house goes quiet, few games do it better.

Overall Dad Score: 8.5/10