Developed for the PlayStation 3 by Insomniac Games

Available through the PlayStation Network for $15

Rated "E" For Everyone

Quest For Booty is a mini-adventure, a $15 game not available through stores but only as a download through the PlayStation 3’s online service. As short as it may be, it will only take a night or two to complete, the game offers the same robust experience in terms of its gameplay and cut-scenes as the full length Ratchet & Clank titles. There’s platforms to jump, enemies to battle, traps to avoid, puzzles to solve, and full-scale battles to survive, all while off-beat characters deliver silly jokes and moments of dry wit. It’s more of what fans of the series enjoy and all there will be to tie them over until the next full-length adventure arrives in late 2009.

The story picks up from the end of Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction. Clank has been kidnapped by a mysterious alien race called the Zoni and so Ratchet sets out on a solo pirate adventure to gather the first clues towards finding his robot buddy. Clank is my favorite character in the series and I’m very disappointed to find him absent here. In his place, Ratchet travels with Talwyn, a girl adventurer who offers guidance and minimal support in battles and Rusty Pete, a perpetually sloshed pirate robot who delivers the comic relief. Neither quite fills Clank’s metal shoes. I like pirate adventures and I like Clank and so will have to wait for another time for the two to come together.

The goal here is not to rescue Clank, that’s for another game, but to merely find the dread pirate Captain Angstrom Darkwater who can point them in the right direction. This leads Ratchet into a series of cannons that fire him from ship to ship where he must fight robot pirates, using his wrench as a sword and his blaster as a buccaneer’s pistol.

The fights take him to a tropical island where a series of towers provide platform puzzles based on timed jumps, walking vertically along surfaces using magnetic boots, and grinding along complex rail systems. It’s my favorite part of the game as each tower is different and mixes both action and complex thinking. In some sequences you have to scoop up hot rocks with your wrench as you grind past along the rails while in others you’re given a neat energy tether to move platforms and rotate gates.

As you battle more and more pirates using a specific weapon, it will go up in level and upgrade to fire more powerful shots or wider fire patterns. There’s a wide array of weapons that will unlock throughout the game including a grenade launcher, an insect-like swarm of nano-machines, and a target-seeking rocket launcher.

In place of bosses there are epic battles, moments where the game will send wave after wave of different types of enemies and you’ll need to learn both how to conserve your health to make it through alive and to choose which weapons are the most effective against which baddies. Some have large shields, some attack from far away, others launch unusual attacks.

All of this is fun, but it adds nothing new to the Ratchet & Clank series, leaving the innovative twists for the full-scale games instead.

Over the past three years I’ve had long discussions with executives from both Sony and Microsoft regarding the idea of episodic games and their potential as the future of the industry. The idea of delivering six mini-adventures over the PlayStation Network or Xbox Live instead of a full-featured game on a disc has been an attractive one for video game execs who are merely waiting for audiences to catch up to the idea.

Quest For Booty is the first mini-adventure based on a feature franchise and so the first to offer a taste of what an episodic game might be like. It’s a difficult balance as gamers can already download the first chapters of select games for free as demos, so episodic adventures need to deliver an experience that’s longer, something Quest For Booty does. The shorter length forces the game to move faster through its growth system and so you level up faster and earn bigger weapons and rewards faster, which I think many gamers will like. There’s less work, less grind, for more rewards.

Where Insomniac falters with this adventure is in its story, which is really just a disposable, in-between segway between Tools of Destruction and the upcoming title next year. We don’t get to see Clank get kidnapped or rescued, there’s no beginning or satisfying end, it’s just one big piece of middle.

What I was hoping for was a separate, off-beat quest, a Ratchet & Clank Go To White Castle if you will, where the two comedic characters can shrug off the pressures of a larger campaign and just indulge in a series of surreal, gameplay-infused antics. What we’re given feels like the first four chapters of the next game instead.

The solid gameplay and cut-scenes will surely leave fans wanting more and my hope is that Quest For Booty does well enough to force Insomniac to make more mini-adventurers, enough that we’ll get to see them do something really different with the idea of what a mini-adventure can be.