Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart: The Load Time as Set Piece

Every console generation gets a launch showcase built to prove the hardware was worth the upgrade, and most of them are forgotten within a year because a tech demo dressed as a game rarely survives contact with an actual second playthrough. Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart was explicitly built to sell the PS5’s SSD — instant loading, no seams between dimensions — and it’s a rare example of that kind of showcase holding up as a genuinely good game once the hardware talking points stop being novel. The reason is that Insomniac didn’t just use the instant loading to remove loading screens. It built a combat mechanic out of it.

The Rift as a Verb, Not a Cutscene

The dimensional rifts that give the game its subtitle aren’t a transition animation — they’re a traversal and combat tool Ratchet can trigger mid-fight, yanking himself (or the new co-lead, Rivet) instantly into an entirely different, unrelated arena stitched into the same encounter. A boss fight can tear itself in half and reassemble around you in a different biome without a single frame of loading, and Insomniac uses that instant reassembly as a genuine gameplay beat rather than a marketing flex: certain encounters are built specifically around chaining several rift-pulls together, using the disorientation of the sudden environment change as its own kind of combat pressure.

This matters because most “look what the hardware can do” features from a console’s launch window end up being purely presentational — better lighting, more particles, faster loads between menus. Rift Apart’s central technical trick is instead load-bearing (in the least metaphorical sense possible) for how combat actually plays, which is the difference between a tech demo and a game that happens to need new hardware to exist.

Insomniac’s Long Game

Rift Apart is the latest entry in a franchise Insomniac has been quietly refining since 2002’s original Ratchet & Clank, and the studio’s whole identity — meticulous traversal polish, weapon design with real personality, a refusal to let spectacle outrun playability — is fully intact here. The grind-rail and wall-run traversal that’s been a series signature since the PS2 era gets a natural extension in the rift mechanic, treating dimension-hopping as just the newest traversal tool in a lineage that’s always been about movement feeling good first and looking good second. Insomniac’s reputation as a studio that actually ships polished, complete games on schedule is visible in exactly this kind of continuity — Rift Apart doesn’t reinvent the series so much as it finds the next logical extension of what already worked, which is a harder trick to pull off convincingly than it sounds.

The weapon design carries the same care. Returning favourites like the Ricochet get reworked to take advantage of faster switching, while new additions — a lawn-and-garden-themed weapon that turns enemies into decorative topiary, a black hole launcher for crowd control — keep the series’ tradition of treating armaments as jokes with genuine tactical value rather than jokes that happen to also do damage. It’s a tightrope walk the studio has been managing since the PS2 games, and Rift Apart doesn’t drop the thread.

The Padding Nobody Needed

The honest complaint about Rift Apart is that its open-hub planets carry more collectible busywork than the tightly authored campaign around them really needs — armour fragments, gold bolts, spybot challenges scattered across each world in a way that feels obligatory rather than essential, a checklist inherited from open-world design trends rather than something this specific game’s pacing asked for. The core campaign, by contrast, moves with real confidence: it rarely overstays a set-piece, and the rift mechanic keeps even familiar platforming beats feeling structurally fresh scene to scene.

That contrast — a tight main line surrounded by a slightly baggy halo of side content — is common enough across big-budget platformers now that it barely counts as a specific criticism of this game so much as an industry-wide habit. It’s worth naming anyway, because Rift Apart’s campaign is disciplined enough elsewhere that the collectible sprawl stands out more than it might in a messier game.

Spectacle in Service of Legibility

What’s easy to miss under the sheer visual density of Rift Apart’s set-pieces is how legible the combat stays even at its busiest. Screens fill with enemies, particle effects, rift tears and environmental hazards simultaneously, and yet Insomniac’s encounter design keeps threat sources readable — enemy attacks telegraph clearly against the visual noise, and the game’s assist options (aim assist, difficulty sliders) are generous enough that the spectacle rarely tips into genuine unfairness. That’s a harder engineering and design problem than it gets credit for: a franchise built on maximalist visual chaos still has to make sure the player can parse what’s actually dangerous in the middle of it, and Rift Apart manages that balance more consistently than most of its blockbuster contemporaries.

The game’s ray-traced fidelity mode and higher-frame-rate performance mode both preserve this legibility, which is itself worth noting — plenty of current-generation games treat their performance mode as a compromised afterthought, while Rift Apart’s feels like a fully considered alternative rather than a downgrade bolted on to satisfy a marketing checkbox.

The DualSense as Weapon Feedback

Insomniac’s use of the PS5’s DualSense controller deserves its own note, because it’s doing similar work to the rift mechanic in a quieter register — taking a hardware feature that could easily have been a gimmick and building genuine gameplay information into it. Adaptive triggers give each weapon a distinct resistance profile, and several guns use a secondary trigger stage to switch fire modes entirely, meaning the controller itself becomes part of how you read which weapon you’re holding and what it’s about to do. It’s the same philosophy that makes the rift mechanic work: rather than treating the new hardware as a marketing bullet point bolted onto an otherwise unchanged design, Insomniac keeps asking what the feature actually lets a player feel that they couldn’t before, and building the mechanic outward from that answer.

This extends to the game’s audio design, which uses the console’s 3D audio implementation to place enemy gunfire and environmental hazards specifically enough that sound becomes a legitimate secondary information channel in the busiest fights — useful precisely because the visual density discussed above can occasionally outpace what the eye alone can track in real time.

Traversal Beyond the Rift

It would undersell Rift Apart to make it sound like the dimensional rift is the only traversal idea worth discussing. The game also introduces a magnetised boot mechanic for navigating specific metal surfaces at odd angles, and expands the series’ long-standing grind-rail traversal with rail-switching sequences that ask for quick reflexive decisions rather than the more passive rail-riding of earlier entries. None of these tools get the marketing attention the rift mechanic does, but they round out a traversal package that feels considered across its full range rather than built around one headline trick with everything else left on autopilot.

The platforming stretches that combine two or three of these systems in sequence — a rail run into a rift pull into a magnetised wall-climb — are where the game’s moment-to-moment design peaks, chaining distinct movement grammars together fast enough that no single tool overstays its welcome before the next one arrives to keep the sequence feeling fresh.

Two Protagonists, Not One With a Reskin

Rivet’s introduction as a full co-protagonist is handled with more care than franchise tradition might have predicted. Rather than functioning as a reskinned Ratchet with identical moveset and voice lines swapped, she carries her own weapon variants, her own combat animations, and a personality shaped by a harder life in her home dimension — a Lombax who grew up without the found family Ratchet has always had around him. The campaign alternates between the two leads by story chapter rather than letting the player choose freely, a structural decision that keeps each character’s arc paced deliberately rather than left to whichever protagonist a given player happens to prefer.

That structural discipline matters for how the story lands. Letting Rivet’s chapters stand fully on their own, rather than treating her as a bonus mode layered onto Ratchet’s game, is what makes the back half’s parallel-universe theme actually cohere rather than reading as two separate games stitched together by the rift gimmick that connects them.

Spoilers below

The story reintroduces the villainous Dr. Nefarious mid-scheme, whose dimension-hopping device accidentally strands Ratchet and Clank in a parallel universe and introduces Rivet, a Lombax variant from that alternate dimension who becomes a full co-protagonist rather than a guest character. The two leads’ arcs run in parallel — Ratchet processing being one of the last of his kind, Rivet learning to trust allies after a life spent alone in a crueler version of the same universe — and the game resists an easy full merger of the two characters’ worlds, closing with both dimensions intact and a clear thread for where a sequel could go rather than a tidy, closed-off ending.

Rift Apart is proof that a hardware showcase can still be a good game if the showcase feature is wired into the actual verbs rather than just the loading bar — a lesson worth remembering every time a new console generation arrives promising a headline spec that turns out, on inspection, to only ever show up in a menu transition. For more on the studio behind it, Insomniac’s track record is worth the deeper read, and for the wider argument about what loading screens cost game design when they’re not solved this cleanly, the desk has made the case elsewhere. The same studio’s traversal-first instincts show up again, sharpened further, in Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, which is the clearest evidence that Rift Apart’s movement polish wasn’t a one-off.