But perhaps more significantly, the entire game is themed around dimensional rifts, yet is set almost entirely in the one dimension. It has that neat, mind-bending gimmick where you pull a local yellow rip around you so as to end up standing on the other side of it (my head never managed to be okay with this, finding it brilliantly disorienting), but that's just a teleport to a nearby point on the same level. There are dimensional pockets to find, but these are just mini-challenge levels to win new armor. Those moments you saw in the trailers, where Ratchet flew through rift after rift after rift into different worlds—they're just for the cutscenes. In the end, you're just planet hopping like last time, only in a different dimension.
It feels like such a weirdly missed opportunity. While this is a superb third-person action game, utterly packed with the same joy as 2016's game plus a few new tricks, it feels weirdly lacking in inspiration. As much as I've hugely enjoyed playing it, and as stunned as I've been by its art, in the end it is just another one: Bigger, prettier, with more moves and weapons, but no new underlying force I can find that might have propelled its creation. Given the opportunities dimension-hopping could have provided, this lack of originality feels strange, especially with the PS5's tech. It shows that it could do it—there are levels split between two times, and you jump back and forth between them, the world redrawn around you as you play, no loading, no hesitation. I badly wanted to do the same things in dimensional rifts.