Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart was revealed during the PlayStation 5 reveal event on June 11, 2020, and the game was released on June 11, 2021, for the PlayStation 5. It is one of the first PS5 exclusives to showcase raytracing and utilize the console’s full potential. With little to no loading screens in various game segments, it pushed the boundaries of what a next-gen game can do.
The game was developed by Insomniac Games and published by Sony Interactive Entertainment. It is the ninth main installment in the Ratchet & Clank series and a sequel to Ratchet & Clank: Into the Nexus. Rift Apart was praised for its visuals, gameplay, and humor, and it received a score of 88/100 on Metacritic. A PC port was released on July 26, 2023. Were you thinking about getting it? Read till the end for everything you need to know.
What’s New in Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart PC Port?
Here’s what’s new in this PC port:
- PC Optimized Graphics
- Experience the latest performance-enhancing upscaling technologies, including NVIDIA DLSS 3, AMD FSR 2, Intel XeSS, and Insomniac Games’ Temporal Injection.
- Unlock your framerate and enjoy the smoothest possible gameplay.
- Enhance your image quality with NVIDIA DLSS.
- Ultra-Wide Monitor Support
- Immerse yourself in the game with ultra-wide support for 21:9, 32:9, and 48:9 resolutions.
- Experience the game’s vast world in all its glory.
- Ray-Traced Reflections and Shadows
- Bring the worlds of Ratchet and Clank to life with ray-traced reflections and shadows.
- See your surroundings’ reflections in metals, water puddles, and other surfaces.
- Experience the shadows of buildings and objects cast in real time.
- Controls and Customization
- Play with the DualSense controller to experience haptic feedback and dynamic trigger effects.
- Or choose a mouse and keyboard and customize your controls to your liking.
In-game actions come to life in your hands with haptic feedback and dynamic trigger effects while playing on a wired connection, thanks to the PS5 DualSense controller. Also, the wide range of graphical choices guarantees that you will play the way that best suits your style. And as a cherry on top, you have many aspect ratios.
Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart PC Review
To save you time, let me tell you if the game is worth it. Yes, Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart is a great game. It has won praise from critics for its humor, playability, and aesthetic appeal. Plus, it was acclaimed for having some of the most stunning visuals ever seen in a 3D platformer, and it started as a “next-generation” visual showcase during the PlayStation 5 reveal event. The seamless and captivating gameplay and the top-notch, humorous plot components also received acclaim.
Here are some of the things that people liked about Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart:
- The visuals: The game is breathtaking, with some of the most gorgeous visuals ever seen in a 3D platformer. The game runs smoothly at over 60 frames per second on most high-end PCs and has extraordinarily rich character models, scenery, and effects.
- The gameplay: Just as spectacular as the graphics is the gameplay. New gameplay elements in the game include the capacity to switch between several planets in the new dimension. Also, when compared to earlier Ratchet & Clank games, the fighting is more agile and exciting.
- The humor: The game’s clever language and slapstick comedy will have you giggling the entire time you play it.
As a whole, Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart is an excellent game that will undoubtedly delight both series regulars and newcomers alike. The PC port is the best way to enjoy this fantastic game since it has excellent graphics, apart from its cleaner gameplay (on PC with new improvements), and humor. Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart is a 3D platformer you should check out if you like the genre. It’s a fantastic game that will keep you occupied for many hours.
Story
In Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart, Ratchet and Clank collaborate with Rivet and Kit, their dimensional counterparts, to stop Nefarious from destroying the multiverse. Ratchet now receives a new Dimensionator from Clank, which was supposed to enable him to traverse dimensions and track down his family. But this new Dimensionator was taken by Dr. Nefarious. Nefarious uses it to cause havoc in a separate dimension after teleporting the group there. Ratchet, Clank, Rivet, and Kit must utilize the Dimensionator to stop Nefarious and preserve the entire multiverse.
They encounter several new people that aid them on their trip, such as Gary, a cosmic prophet, and other new characters, as well as the new dimensional equivalents of fan favorites Captain Qwark, Skidd, and Pierre.
This fast-moving, entertaining drama has a lot of humor and action. The voice acting is excellent, and the characters are well-developed.
Both the game and the narrative are entertaining. Fans of the series and those who appreciate 3D platformers must play it. This game has spectacular visuals, including some of the most amazing 3D platformer images ever created.
Gameplay
The gameplay in Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart is among the greatest in the whole franchise. The fighting is exciting and fluid, and the controls are precise and responsive. The game also includes many brand-new gameplay elements, like the capacity to traverse several dimensional planets with almost no loading screen.
The sensation of speed in Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart’s gameplay is one of its strongest features. You’ll move quickly through stages, hopping across platforms and shooting opponents as the game is always in fast-paced motion. With a large selection of weaponry (unlocked in your journey), the fight is also quite enjoyable.
Another fantastic improvement to the gameplay is the capability to move between various planets in the new dimension (it’s so good, I have to mention it once again). By doing so, you can discover new worlds, secret treasures, and challenges. There are parts of the game where you are ported across many dimensions and even encounter brand-new enemy types from various other dimensions. Each of the dimensions has a distinct ambiance and is aesthetically gorgeous.
Fans of the franchise and newbies will enjoy the fast-paced, captivating, and aesthetically spectacular gameplay in Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart.
Sound
Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart has excellent audio. The voice acting is top-notch, the sound effects are immersive, and the music is catchy and cheerful.
Mark Mothersbaugh, who also created the music for the earlier Ratchet & Clank games, composed the soundtrack for Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart. The song’s symphonic and electronic composition effectively encapsulates the game’s fervor and thrill in this new age.
You will also love the new outstanding voice acting as well. Characters come to life thanks to the performers, whose energetic and personable performances make these new-gen characters more lifelike.
Even on a mid-range gaming headphone, you will notice it has immersive sound effects. Weapons firing, explosions, and beating enemies with your melee all provide beautiful sounds. Additionally, the sound effects contribute to the game’s mood.
Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart has an outlandish sound design overall. It contributes significantly to the game’s appeal. The sound effects, voice acting, and music are all of the highest caliber, enhancing the gameplay beautifully.
Graphics
Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart has stunning visuals. The game’s in-house Insomniac Engine v. 4.0 technology produces some of the most graphically stunning 3D platformer visuals ever. The game operates at about 140+ fluid frames per second on high-end PCs. It features extraordinarily complex character models with hair & fur, landscapes with high draw distance, raytraced surfaces, and spectacular particle effects.
Ray tracing’s utilization in the game is exceptionally excellent. For new gamers, Ray tracing is a technique that can produce almost photorealistic graphics by simulating how light interacts in the actual environment. Ray tracing creates realistic reflections, shadows, and ambient occlusion in Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart.
The locations in the game are also quite intricate. Every location, from the lush Sargasso woodlands to the futuristic neon-lit alleys of Nefarious City, is rich in detail. These new worlds are also teeming with life. Big animals, smaller sentient species, wandering robots, and other enemy types exist in many of them.
The character designs in the game are also excellent. The movements of Ratchet, Clank, Rivet, and Kit are smooth and lifelike, and each character is highly detailed. The opponents in the game are likewise attractively made, and their voice lines appear straight from a comic book. All these elements make this one of the best platformers a PlayStation Studio ever produced.
Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart has excellent visuals throughout. The game is a sensory feast, and the graphics significantly affect how pleasant it is. Even the pickiest gamers will be blown away.
Here are some aspects of Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart’s visuals that I found appealing:
- Ray tracing is effectively used throughout the environment.
- All the levels in the game are highly intricate.
- Top-notch character models with fabulous fur, thanks to DLSS frame generation.
- On most high-end PCs, the game plays well at over 144 frames per second.
An NVIDIA RTX card is now essential for connecting these. Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart looks better than ever, thanks to Ray Tracing, the new DLSS 3, and other technological marvels.
PC Performance & DLSS 3
New Deep Learning Super Sampling technology from Nvidia called DLSS 3 is intended to boost gaming performance and visual quality. In DLSS 3 (to put it in simpler terms), lower-quality pictures are upscaled to higher resolution using AI, producing smoother framerates and crisper graphics.
One of the numerous new games that support DLSS 3 on the PC is Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart. The game looks fantastic on PC, but DLSS 3 ups the ante. The visuals are much clearer, and during my testing on RTX 4080, the game touches 180 frames per second with DLSS 3 enabled.
Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart has four distinct DLSS 3 settings: Quality, Balanced, Performance, and Ultra Performance. The Ultra Performance level offers the highest performance, while the Quality setting offers the finest visual quality. A reasonable compromise between image quality and performance may be found between the Balanced and Performance settings.
On my review unit Alienware laptop and my computer with an RTX 4080 graphics card, as mentioned, I tried DLSS 3 on them. The game played at a smooth 80+ to 120+ frames per second at 4K resolution and a whooping 180+ FPS in 1440p with the Quality option while DLSS 3 was enabled. Compared to DLSS 2.0, the generated frames’ image quality was much better, and no artifacts were visible to the eyes of a regular player (unless you are looking for them like me).
I also put DLSS 3’s Performance and Balanced settings to the test. The game played smoothly at 144+ frames per second at 4K resolution while using the Balanced option, and the visual quality was exceptional. The game played smoothly at 200+ frames per second at 1440p resolution when the Performance level was used, even in heavy fight scenes. The visual quality was still respectable.
All around, DLSS 3 in Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart impressed me. It offers a sizable speed gain and a perceptible image quality enhancement.
The advantages of DLSS 3 in Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart are as follows:
- Increased performance: Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart’s performance can be seriously improved using DLSS 3, enabling you to play the game at higher resolutions and framerates.
- Improved image quality: DLSS 3 can further enhance the visual quality of Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart, giving the game a better, more detailed appearance.
- Less obvious artifacts: DLSS 3 creates less obvious artifacts than earlier DLSS iterations.
Here are some of the drawbacks of using DLSS 3 in Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart:
- Not all cards support DLSS 3. Especially if you go back a generation.
- DLSS 3 only works with NVIDIA’s 4000-series RTX graphics cards.
- DLSS 3 may introduce some minor visual artifacts which are being fixed by the devs in recent patches.
Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart gains a lot with the addition of DLSS 3. Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart’s DLSS 3 should be enabled if you have an RTX graphics card.
Options in Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart
A prominent game changer in Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart is the various upscaling technologies the devs managed to add to the port. You can switch between the different upscaling algorithms to suit your needs. They include Insomniac Games’ Temporal Injection, NVIDIA DLSS 3, AMD FSR 2, ad Intel XeSS.
Compared to Insomniac Games’ Temporal Injection (the default on the PS5), some upscaling methods enable you to play the game at a higher resolution than the PS5 version. For example, DLSS 3 was the best choice for me here. Tinkering with various values of DLSS 3 and other NVIDIA settings produced a sharper image with fewer overall jagged pixels. You will surely notice these differences when you are seated near your display.
I picked DLSS 3 over others mainly because it supported the game’s ray-traced reflections and exterior shadows. Talking about the raytracing, both my test units, an Alienware x16 (review coming up soon) and my main rig with an RTX 4080, were able to create reflections far better than the ones in PS5.
All the objects were reproduced in raytracing must clearly and were not blurry as in the PS5 version. Apart from raytracing, DLSS 3 always came on top among all the upscaling options. It performed better in high-action scenes with action-packed, particle effects were crisp, and even hair & fur on the characters were much more detailed.
If you plan to use the raytracing set to high, AMD FSR 2 lacks the capabilities of other algorithms. Insomniac Games’ Temporal Injection and Intel XeSS were to perform well in high RT options. And as PlayStation games are known to use the checkerboard rendering technique, carried to the Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart if you opt for a high RT setting. And as DLSS 3 and checkerboarding run on different principles, you will find a slight mismatch in the reflected visuals. Apart from this, DLSS 3 is the best one to select among all the options.
DLSS 3 also works wonders on ray-traced shadows, which is lacking in the PS5 version of the game. But there is an issue with the game. Ray-traced shadows do not work on moving objects. This means when you look at the trees and plants moving with the wind, the RT shadows don’t reflect this. This is due to an issue at the game dev’s end rather than your GPU. We hope this will be fixed in a patch in the future.
You might first notice the hair quality when playing on a 4K monitor. The hair quality on PS5 is comparable to the medium hair quality option on PC. From here, the detailing goes up.
But the game still feels not polished yet by the developers considering the artifact issues and antialiasing glitches you see when DLSS Frame Generation is turned on. Considering how well Insomniac managed to implement RT & DLSS into their previous PC ports, like Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered and Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales, which Nixxes Software, Ratchet & Clank also ported: Rift Apart feels like it needed a bit more time to utilize the full potential of a new RTX card.
This lack of polishing by Nixxes Software was evident in the game during the launch day. Thankfully, most of the bugs & graphical instabilities were fixed in newer patches. But Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart feels like a game that missed an opportunity here to fulfill the eye candy dreams of a high-end PC user.
The game is not flawed in any way at all. It is just this port missed the mark by a bit. A few more months in the ‘port’ cycle might have done it justice. But as of now, we can only hope for further patches from devs to improve the game’s graphical fidelity.
NVIDIA Reflex: Make Your Gameplay More Responsive
Yes, DLSS 3 is exclusive to 4000-series RTX cards. But for older GPU users, something magical is also in store here. NVIDIA Reflex may be activated in Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart by users of GeForce GTX 900 Series graphics cards and newer. NVIDIA Reflex can cut system latency by up to 48% once turned on. This implies that every gaming action will happen more quickly, providing you an advantage in multiplayer games and enhancing single-player games.
With the help of the NVIDIA Reflex technology, your gaming experience will be more responsive. This will enable you to successfully execute difficult leaps, evade opponent assaults, and generally improve your game experience.
Open the NVIDIA Control Panel and select Manage 3D Settings > Programme Settings to turn on NVIDIA Reflex. Pick Ratchet and Clank: Rift. Activate the NVIDIA Reflex option after removing it from the list of programs.
The system latency should significantly decrease if NVIDIA Reflex is activated. Using the NVIDIA Reflex Latency Analyzer, you may gauge the reduction in latency. The following are some advantages of using NVIDIA Reflex:
- Improved response times: NVIDIA Reflex can help you respond to game events more quickly, providing an advantage.
- Playing more fluidly is possible thanks to NVIDIA Reflex, which helps lessen input latency and increase responsiveness.
- Accuracy is increased thanks to NVIDIA Reflex, which makes hitting targets simpler.
- NVIDIA Reflex is a fantastic choice to enhance your gaming experience.
All GeForce GTX 900 Series graphics cards and newer users are eligible to use this technology for free. So give it a shot and see how it can improve the responsiveness of your games.
NVIDIA RTX IO GPU Accelerated Storage Technology
New GPU-accelerated storage technology called NVIDIA RTX IO is used in Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart. This revolutionary function speeds up the loading of assets, facilitating Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart’s fluid portal-jumping action. This aids in quickly loading all the worlds you see during the dimension-hopping scenes if you have watched the game’s trailer.
Verdict
Fans of the franchise or anybody who appreciates a decent platformer must download Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, a graphically spectacular and entertaining action-adventure game. The game has excellent aesthetics, many tools and weaponry, and hectic and captivating gameplay.
Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart’s strong PC port supports various resolutions and frame rates. The game also has multiple extra features, such as DLSS 3 and support for DualSense controllers.
Visually gorgeous game Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart gains a lot from DLSS 3. With DLSS, the game’s vivid colors and intricate settings come to life, and the performance improvement is substantial. With DLSS turned on, you can achieve a smooth framerate even with less powerful hardware.
Along with the graphical upgrades, DLSS also lessens input lag, improving the game’s responsiveness. This helps immensely in quick-paced action scenes.
DLSS is a need if you wish to play Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart on a PC. The game looks and feels better, thanks to the free performance improvement.
The pros and cons of Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart on PC are as follows:
- Pros:
- With DLSS enabled, stunning visuals
- Significantly improved performance
- Minimizes input latency
- Similar options for customization, like Spider-Man ports
- Support for DualSense controllers
- Cons:
- A few graphics issues
- It needs a new gen GPU to operate at high settings.
In conclusion, Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart is an excellent PC version with considerable advantages from DLSS 3. If you enjoy platformers or are just looking for a visually impressive action-adventure game, you should check it out. DLSS 3 is a fantastic addition to Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, in my opinion. It improves the game’s appearance, feel, and performance without a cost. Anyone who likes action-adventure games or graphically amazing games should play this one. I suggest giving this game a try if you have an RTX card and if you’re still thinking about purchasing this game.