Ratchet and Clank Trophies – Platinum Obsession Review

I dove straight into this game. I smashed out the first few levels fairly quickly. Here I was fast becoming confident this would be quick and easy platinum on my PlayStation Trophy Hunting journey. As an old-school platformer, I didn’t find the game too difficult, although I don’t think many would at the start, and the platinum list looked pretty obtainable. According to psnprofiles, this was a 25 hour platinum with a few missable. I took note of the missables; none of them looked too hard.

So I sped through the early and mid-game, all the while thinking to myself – no way this will take 25 hours to platinum. Well, unfortunately, it was mid to late game before I noticed that there was a trophy that required you to max out all weapons. Max out meant level 10, and you could only get to level 5 on your first playthrough. Here I was, still using the same 4 weapons that had reached level 5 probably 8 hours ago. Thus, effectively adding that time to the platinum. By the end of my platinum obsession journey for Ratchet and Clank, I had finished my 3rd playthrough (bar the final boss). All thanks to my own mistake. Oh well, to be honest, I didn’t get sick of blowing up strange animated alien creatures, or even making them dance whilst I landed grenades at their feet. I was content with finishing this on my third playthrough.

The missable trophies include not auto hacking any of the trespasser terminals. Whilst some of them can be quite difficult I was able to accomplish this task without using a guide. Some may or may not have taken longer than they should before those damned green lights showed up.

I had read that the death by disco (missable) was quite difficult to get, but as long as you use groovitron on each new enemy that you spot, you should get this midway through your second playthrough. At least, that’s what happened to me. I got this much sooner than I thought. It was a bit of a relief that I didn’t have to grind as some people had mentioned online.

Much of the frustration with finding the ‘collectibles’ can be alleviated with the map-o-metric (an end-game gadget that highlights everything you have missed on each map). I would advise not worrying about collecting everything until you have this, as it saves a lot of time. Also, everything carries through to your second playthrough.

The final boss is also quite challenging and took me a couple of hours to defeat. He has quite a few attacks and towards the end of the fight, he starts to release these heat-seeking floating land mines in clumps of about 15. It took me a while to decide to save up ammo for one of my guns and simply whip it out when he deploys these. He also spawns in flying warbots that are very tanky and will destroy you if you don’t take them out. Additionally, on the few landing spaces that are present, he will deploy these magnetic mines that pull you in if you land near them. These were a bit of a nightmare as I needed to land now and then to refuel my jet-pack, and often I would land at full health, be destroyed by these mines, and then get one-shotted by the boss as I took off. Frustrating. But, in the end, I learned to destroy these mines before landing, and that helped a lot. Additionally, you need to be very careful of ammo as ammo crates are very few and far between. Overall, I’m happy I don’t need to fight this guy again, and I’m not sure that younger me would’ve been able to handle him on the PS2 back in the day.

I had finished all the trophies besides the weapon level ones before I had finished my second playthrough, As I mentioned earlier, it wasn’t too bad and I still enjoyed using each one of the weapons. The sheep/goatinator was a highlight – this turns enemies in the sheep/goat depending on the level of the weapon. By the end of my Ratchet and Clank platinum obsession journey I had probably had enough of the game for a while, but I almost certainly will be picking up Rift Apart this year at some stage. Ratchet and Clank trophies complete, platinum obtained.