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  • Alternate Character Interpretation: Ace Hardlight is not a good person, but was he really the willingly bloodthirsty dragon to Vox who had a sudden Heel Realization after Ratchet beat him to a pulp, or was he just as much a victim of Vox as Ratchet who had long crossed the Despair Event Horizon and convinced himself that he had no future outside of DreadZone, and decided to just embrace its dog eat dog nature until his time was up? A few in-game scenes and his somewhat sympathetic out-of-game backstory make either one plausible.
  • Annoying Video Game Helper: Deadlocked seems intent on pointing out the obvious — repeatedly, and by at least two characters in a row.
  • Awesome Moments: For those that love Co-Op Multiplayer, you and a buddy could play the entire campaign in split-screen, albeit with a cap of 30 frames per second, and you get Merc and Green's exclusive gear so both players can trade off who handles the objective. Even better, the second player can unlock additional skins, meaning Ratchet and Jak can finally kick all sorts of ass together.
  • Base-Breaking Character: Dallas and Juanita; though their commentary is funny at times it really gets kind of annoying when they always try to put Ratchet down during the fights. Dallas sometimes gets impressed with Ratchet's skill but Juanita rarely compliments the Lombax. Of course, their last few appearances show that they're just as much as hostages as Ratchet, and were forced to slander him at the threat of death. In the final mission, when Vox finally snaps and puts them both in Deadlocked collars, the two support Ratchet.
  • Best Level Ever:
    • Planet Shaar, which is one of the most enemy-dense levels in the game and offers just the right amount of challenge and action. It helps that it has a side challenge that is ridiculously easy to grind for bolts and experience on (especially during Challenge Mode).
    • Stygia is also a very fun and memorable level not only because of its sheer verticality, but also because of what's at stake if Team Darkstar don't reactivate the planetary defenses in time. The track that plays during the second campaign mission, Energy Collector, really sets the overall mood of the level quite well.
    • Also Ghost Station, the penultimate level and last true DreadZone challenge. It has great atmosphere, really feels like the ultimate challenge, and brings in previously unseen ghost enemies, including Robot Zombie Ghosts. And the final mission includes storming the station using the hovership, preventing Vox from using the place ever again and makes you feel like you're here taking revenge for everything he has done.
  • Catharsis Factor: After Ace Hardlight almost kills Al by outright shooting him, sabotages the team's initial attempt to escape and rubs it in their faces, you will feel more than gratified to have handed him his ass on a silver platter in the game's penultimate boss fight.
  • Complete Monster: Gleeman Vox is the greedy owner of Vox Industries who came up with the idea of DreadZone, a game where he kidnaps heroes across the galaxy and forces them to fight for survival in gladiatorial combat. Even before then, Vox was a cruel boss who had fed his weapon design team to a leviathan after they disagreed with a weapon proposal and used the Fusion Rifle on his employees if he was ever interrupted. Vox keeps the heroes imprisoned with Deadlock collars that will shock them or explode if they don't participate or try to escape, and makes them participate in challenges such as putting the entire planet of Stygia in danger by sabotaging the force fields that protect it from meteor storms. When Ratchet declines his deal, Vox personally tries to kill him brutally and reveals he had a self-destruct device that would blow up the station with everyone on it. Finally, when everyone except him and Ratchet manages to escape, Vox gloats to Ratchet on how he will die along with him and get the highest ratings ever on television.
  • Contested Sequel: Do you prefer the RAC series for its action-platformer gameplay, or the shooter elements that trickled in more and more with the initial trilogy? If you're for the latter, Deadlocked is right up your alley as a game near-entirely focused on shooting stuff with bits of the standard platformer elements in there, refining the often unfinished-feeling elements of Up Your Arsenal's arena segments. Fans at the time that preferred the former on the other hand felt like the game doubled down on the creeping decisions they weren't fond of, and that Deadlocked was too far removed from the origins of the games. Notably, with the series moving to shooter-platformer in full as it progressed, this rendered Deadlocked Vindicated by History while the first couple games would be hit with Early-Installment Weirdness.
  • Demonic Spiders:
    • Beam Turrets, tiny little laser turrets that drop in at random points, and are usually overlooked right until you get a beam in your back. The bigger counterparts also deal truly nasty damage, but are at least easier to see coming.
    • Missile Turrets. Like the Beam Turrets, they hide in the ground until you come close, then pop out and shoot you with a barrage of missiles that do a lot of damage. There's about one second between them appearing and opening fire, making it kind of difficult to engage them. Worse yet, they appear mostly in vehicle levels where the camera zooms out, possibly causing you to miss them.
    • The Executioners hit hard, are about as sturdy as a tank, can hit you from a distance as well as close up, and show up everywhere in the last two-thirds of the game. Luckily, their shots are relatively slow, very predictable, and very easy to dodge, so they only tend to become a threat when paired with other enemies.
    • The Laser Backs. Compared to the Executioners, Laser Backs are just as powerful, perhaps just as tough, have faster and harder to dodge attacks, track your movements whilst hovering in mid-air, and typically show up in groups of two or more. They basically look like giant flying robotic one-eyed crawfish with twin rapid fire machine guns that hit hard. If a group of these guys suddenly shows up, you'd better make destroying them your new top priority, especially if there are already Executioners around.
  • Disappointing Last Level: The DreadZone Control Room, which is just three fairly short and straightforward combat levels, all of which are capped off by you defending Merc and Green while they plant bombs, followed by a fairly easy Final Boss.
  • Fountain of Memes: Dallas is arguably the most quotable character in the game due to his energy. It helps that he is voiced by Daran Norris.
  • Fridge Brilliance:
    • You actually get paid for getting Skill Points in this game, unlike the past entries where they were mostly a Bragging Rights Reward. You are on a reality TV program, so pulling off feats like that obviously improves their ratings.
    • Ace surviving the events of the game is obviously a retcon, but when his health falls low enough, he starts relying almost entirely on invisibility and holographic clones. You could make the argument that he escaped but left Ratchet one final message on his "corpse".
    • Why is Ace Hardlight so unpopular In-Universe? Because part of the whole appeal of Dreadzone is that it's about heroes going through challenges. Ace may have started off his tenure on Dreadzone as a hero, but as time went on his heroism clearly (and publicly) evaporated as he became a Jerkass Blood Knight, thereby losing his appeal. This also explains why the other Exterminators aren't shown as being unpopular: They didn't come from heroic backgrounds and thus are seen by the Dreadzone audience as simply elite gladiators / villains, which in turn would further explain why Ace is hated: Who wants to see their once-favorite hero work with the bad guys to kill other heroes?
  • Game-Breaker:
    • The Freeze Mod. While it isn't as flashy or damaging as the Shock and Napalm Mods, it damn near trivializes combat in the game. It can be acquired as early as Kronos for a paltry 60k bolts, it can be equipped to any weapon off the bat, from your precision weapons to your wide-range crowd control ones, and it actively slows down both your opponents' movement and their attack windups to a crawl, making it impossible for them to fight back as you shoot them into oblivion. Combined with weapons like the Antimatter Rifle, it makes short work of even the toughest enemies in the game, even Executioners and Laser Backs. It's also beloved in the speedrun community, as the animation of freezing and shattering your enemies is quicker than their regular death animations, saving seconds every fight by making new enemies spawn in faster.
    • The Mini Turret Launcher/Quasar Turret Launcher. While it's available somewhat late in the game (after you beat Orxon), it is by far the most useful weapon next to the Harbinger. You can put out as many of these turrets as your ammo allows, and their combined damage output (along with mods like the shock upgrade) will utterly eviscerate any enemy unlucky enough to be caught in their line of sight. And of course, the fact that the turrets attack independently from you means that you can plant some and then fight alongside them.
    • The Scorpion/Leviathan Flail. Its range, area of effect, and healthy starting ammo pool are all greater than that of the B6-Obliterator, effectively letting you replace it. And that's without any mods on it. Putting some area mods on it along with the Omega Shock Mod means possibly clearing the entire screen of all but the resident Demonic Spiders in just one or two swings, and filling the rest of spaces with ammo mods means you won't need to worry about its ammunition ever again. Its only real weakness is Airborne Mooks, but you have other weapons for those.
    • The Mega Supernova V99, the fully upgraded version of the already insanely powerful Harbinger. All minor foes are vaporized in one shot, and the bosses take massive damage from it.
    • Once you get to Challenge Mode, you get the option to buy the Jackpot and XP Alpha Mods. While both are quite expensive to buy, both of them (especially the former) turn the rest of the game into a cakewalk—two Jackpot mods alone will allow Ratchet to stack up millions of bolts in mere minutes and thus quickly acquire all of the Mega weapons and then stack up on other Alpha Mods, and the XP mod makes it so that your health and each one of your mega weapons can be upgraded to level 99 in a ridiculously short period of time. The XP mod is also useful in places where health recovery is scarce, since every HP-up also restores some health.
    • The Fusion Rifle is easily the most versatile gun in the game, and is available as soon as you make it to the third campaign on Kronos. Due to this gun having massive damage output, a large and wide beam that pierces through enemies, and a visible crosshair with perfect accuracy even when the scope isn't in use, it's just as effective as a magnum to take out foes up close as it is a sniper to pick off encounters before they happen. While its rate-of-fire and ammo capacity are a bit low, they can be easily balanced out with a few Alpha Mods, and putting the Freeze Mod on it turns the gun into a death-dealer that also temporarily disables whatever enemy survived the shot. While bosses are a bit more resistant to it than the Mooks, each shot will still take chunks off of their health bars.
  • Good Bad Bugs: The Shield Link is obviously intended to make its user defenseless while they put a shield on their ally. However, when used on a bolt crank, the user of the item can enter the shield by jumping to the top, allowing them to hold the shield without fear.
  • Harsher in Hindsight: At the beginning of the game, Ratchet jokes with Sasha, who is now the Mayor of Metropolis, over if the city is still in once piece. The beginning of the very next (canon) game shows Metropolis being attacked by a genocidal Emperor who's looking for Ratchet for what he is. It's doubtful Sasha would take these jokes with good humor again.
  • It's Short, So It Sucks!: One of the most persistent complaints about the game is that its much shorter than the other Ratchet & Clank games, due to only having 11 levels (by comparison, the first game is the next shortest and still contains 15 planets with plenty of backtracking for goodies), some of which don't go over 20 or 30 minutes. Even playing all the Dread Challenges only slightly draws out the game longer.
  • Jerkass Woobie: As much of a jackass he is in the game, Ace has a pretty sad backstory. He spent the first five years of his life in an orphanage before being adopted by a group of superheroes whose reputation is in danger because of a few failures beforehand. Throughout his teen years and early adulthood, Ace not only helped restore their reputation, but eventually became their leader and a living legend similar to Qwark. Eventually, Ace's home planet was destroyed, and he left the group in a Despair Event Horizon, leaving him with no option but to join DreadZone, becoming the monster he is today.
  • Memetic Mutation:
  • Moral Event Horizon: Ace Hardlight had certainly crossed it a long time before the events of Deadlocked, but him not only murdering Captain Starshield on-screen, and almost killing Al, all with sadistic glee, makes it clear he's an irredeemable villain.
  • Most Wonderful Sound: The victory theme. Especially gratifying to hear after completing any of the That One Level contenders below. Victory has never sounded so damn good.
  • One-Scene Wonder: Dr. Nefarious makes a cameo at the end of the game, drifting past the wreckage of the DreadZone station while berating Lawrence for "lying" about being in range of a space station.
  • Padding: The subplot about Gleeman Vox struggling to offload his surplus of Ace Hardlight merchandise serves as nothing more than quick comedy between battles, as the reasons for the champion Exterminator's massive unpopularity are very poorly explained, and while it does influence Ace to warn Ratchet not to sign on to become an Exterminator, it doesn't affect Vox's final confrontation with Ratchet at all.
  • Porting Disaster: While the rest of the R&C remasters suffer from glitches that weren't there originally, their glitches were mostly visual and didn't affect the actual gameplay. This game's remaster has both visual and worse glitches. Characters in the in-engine cutscenes seem to skip frames every so often, constant framerate drops (with the campaign co-op suffering from them so bad it becomes nigh-unplayable), some fonts and sound effects were changed, the max number of local multiplayer players was halved from the original 4, and not only was a Game-Breaking Bug from the original not fixed, it's now accompanied by the risk of more corrupted saves if the game freezes during an autosave. It's recommended to save each game to two different slots to avoid losing all progress. All of this is compounded by the fact that this was Sony's apology gift to players for the PSVita port of Full Frontal Assault taking so long to come out, which ended up being a massive porting disaster itself.
  • Rescued from the Scrappy Heap:
    • The Holoshield Launcher now shoots bigger walls that have rectangular shapes instead of ellipse shapes, meaning less stray shots hitting you while you're hiding behind them, and they disappear after a certain time (blinking red beforehand to inform you) instead of after taking enough damage, eliminating the risk of losing your barrier at the worst possible moment. While still not hailed as an amazing item, it now provides a useful tactical tool, especially at higher difficulties.
    • The Mini Turret Launcher too. Some players complained about its upgrade in the prior games, which, while shooting stronger projectiles, had a much slower rate of fire. Some even suggested the upgrade should shoot lasers instead. The Quasar Turret Launcher does exactly that and is thus much more efficient.
  • Scrappy Weapon: The B6-Obliterator. It serves as a decent starting weapon for the first few planets, but it quickly proves itself as not only the worst bomb-based Ratchet & Clank weapon, but one of the worst overall weapons in the entire series. It's a grenade launcher like the iconically broken Mini-Nuke and Nitro Launcher, but it feels undertuned in response to those two. The B6 is quite simply a Master of None, starting with a paltry six ammo and gaining only one shot per Ammo Mod, and it has a slow rate of fire, low damage and a small area-of-effect. While the existence of Alpha Mods lets players fix these problems (save for damage), the fact that the B6 suffers from them all at the same time means that you'll have to settle for either fixing one problem at the expense of ignoring the others, or making minuscule improvements in all categories. The final nail in the B6's coffin is the existence of the Hunter Mine Launcher and Scorpion Flail, which are both better than the B6 in every category; they start off dealing respectable damage and only get stronger, and have more ammo (12 for the Hunter Mine Launcher, 20 for the Scorpion Flail), a higher rate of fire, better AoE, and longer range before modding them.
  • Signature Scene: A negative example — The cutscene that plays just before you're dropped into the first real battle has become infamous due to being one of the most egregious examples of the HD remaster's Porting Disaster status. This screenshot in particular has become the poster child of Sony's poor reputation with rereleases.
  • Spiritual Successor: This game is retroactively considered a The Hunger Games video game due to the subject matter and dark tone.
  • That One Achievement: This game is surprisingly merciful compared to its predecessors when it comes to the Skill Points, but there are a couple of really nasty ones:
    • Skill Points that require you to beat a mission on Exterminator Difficulty with the exception of one on Torval (there is a mission where nobody attacks you, which you can pick for this purpose).
    • "Drunk For Joy", "The Run Away" and "That's Gonna Hurt" on Shaar, which have to be done in the "Landstalker Stalkin'" mission. The first requires you to kill five Laser Backs, and not only can they wreck you, you might miss some of them if you kill the things too fast or crank the bolts in the wrong order. For the second, you have to complete the aforementioned mission without the Landstalker taking any damage, which translates into completing the mission on foot. Note that the enemies here are adapted to the Landstalker's firepower and damage resistance, not yours, and the Skill Point can still fail if even stray fire hits the Landstalker. The last requires you to destroy a Landstalker with the OmniWrench. To save yourself some headache, just select the easiest difficulty when completing these.
  • That One Level:
    • The Kronos level "Enemies Are Such A Grind" becomes this on Hero and Exterminator difficulty. While it's a rather short level, most of it spent on grind rails, and you're constantly hounded by groups of flying mooks who are very good shots and can kill you in just a few hits if you don't shoot them down immediately. And to add insult to injury, you can only use the Dual Vipers on rails, and the nature of its bullets makes it easy to miss your targets—hope you bought the Freeze Mod by this point!
    • The Shaar level "Landstalker Stalkin'", especially on Exterminator Difficulty. This level is loaded with enemies, particularly Stalker turrets that use missiles unlike the others which only use the machine guns.
  • That One Sidequest:
    • "The Big Sleep" becomes this on Exterminator Difficulty. Think it's hard to fight hordes of mooks with your health slowly draining as is? Try doing it when you lose a hitpoint every second. If you haven't already built up a reasonably-sized Nanotech bar, you are in for a world of pain here.
    • The Shaar Dread Challenge "Shoot to Kill" is one of the most exasperating challenges in the game. While it's a very short rail shooting challenge, you are given just enough targets to match your score, and if you miss even one, you have to start all over again. Making this more irritating is that it's easy to mess up the Jackpot timing (which is necessary to beat it) and some of the essential targets are hidden out of plain sight.
    • The Orxon Dread Challenge "Scoring With The Blarg" on Exterminator difficulty. It's stuffed with enemies, but it can be hard to prioritize killing them when you also have to worry about shooting the targets at the same time - and you'll need both the health and the points, as there are no heals in the challenge and the score window likely won't be met until the very last bunch of targets.
    • "Higher Ground", which opens as a Dread Challenge after the Vindicator Tournament. It's the already annoying Tower of Power redesigned by DreadZone's incompetent interns, with grind-rail sections that end in hordes of enemies, difficult jump sections (including some Swingshot jumps where it's very easy to screw up your momentum and fall down), and another grind-rail portion that has some precise jumps to end with.
    • The "Less Is More" DreadZone Station challenge. Fighting off enemies in time before the arena shrinks and crushes you is hard enough—try doing it while your health and your ammo are shrinking at the same time! Especially dreadful on Exterminator difficulty, where the health crates heal much less.
    • Getting all six of the Exterminator Cards. In order, you have to get 400,000 Dread Points (read: beat every single challenge in the game), upgrade your health up to 100, buy all weapons (including the Mega versions) and Omega Mods, get all of the Skill Points, and complete every single mission on Exterminator Difficulty. And your reward for all this? You get to unlock the Ninja Ratchet skin, which slightly increases Ratchet's speed and strength.
    • Getting your health bar maxed out to 999. Even with a lot of XP Alpha Mods equipped, it is a very tedious sidequest that will take you several playthroughs to accomplish.
  • They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: At the time of release, many fans felt like this due to the drastic shift the game took. Platforming was even less of a focus, the maps were designed more for multiplayer rather than single player, and the dark tone of the game put many people off. Such a reaction would not be seen by fans until the release of Ratchet & Clank: All 4 One nearly a decade later. In the case of both, detractors generally agree that while they're good games, they aren't good RAC game.
  • They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: As the lack of his name in the title would suggest, Clank is Demoted to Extra, serving as Ratchet's Mission Control from the DreadZone Containment Suite. While major for the plot as usual, his absence from gameplay (outside of the Alpha Clank skin) soured many on the experience.
  • They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Ace's rather tragic backstory that could've expanded his character in the game and given his warning to Ratchet after his defeat much more dimension was mostly relegated to the strategy guide.
  • Unexpected Character: Nobody expected Dr. Nefarious and Lawrence to appear at the very end.
  • Vindicated by History: At its initial release, Deadlocked got a lot of flack for being very different to the previous three games due to it leaning more on a combat-action playstyle. Today, it is seen as one of the best games of the franchise for its unique gameplay, having quite an entertaining story, giving Ratchet plenty of Character Development, and being the last game in the series to really lean in on the anti-corporate humour of the old trilogy. A few elements of the game (such as weapon modifying and the styles of several arena challenges) returned in A Crack in Time, to the joy of many fans.
  • The Woobie:
    • Green had a terrible past prior to the events of the game. He was forced to fight in a war, and watched many of his friends die. He lost both of his legs in battle, and was sent to a repair bot, whom he fell in love with, but they were not allowed to date. They were caught, and she was turned into a park bench.
    • Even Dallas becomes one towards the end. He and everyone else in DreadZone were taken hostage by Vox to be used as a ratings stunt when Ratchet tries to free them, which if he fails, will result in the entire station being blown up, and no one would survive because of their Deadlocked collars. Dallas is completely terrified, citing that he has his whole life ahead of him, and still has a lot of goals for his future.

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