Jeremy, thank you for buying me this game — I wanted it, and would have purchased it myself — and am very grateful. <3

…But now that’s out of the way, I can say that I didn’t think Size Matters was as good as the other games in the Ratchet & Clank series.  A lot of the same gameplay is there; some pretty solid platforming; a reasonably good selection of fun weaponry; and some comedy from Captain Qwark, but the whole game seems somewhat rushed and disjointed.

Ratchet really hates crabs.

The bulk of Size Matters (at least the way I played it) consists of the sort of run-and-gun platform action that I’d expect from a Ratchet & Clank game.  However, there’re an awful lot of minigames, too: use Clank as a robot in a destruction derby; use Clank as a gun to defend Ratchet from afar; use Clank as a spaceship; beat a purple lion in a hoverboard race; a Lemmings clone featuring small robots.  I didn’t find these minigames particularly fun, and only really bothered to play those that were necessary to complete the game — there were several more “challenges” available for each minigame type, but after attempting just a handful of them I was pretty bored.

"Let's enter Clank in a destruction derby with robot sheep!"

The platforming sections are also let down by an absolutely abysmal camera and poor control layout. The game plays like it was designed for the PS2, in that the absence of a second analog stick and L2/R2 buttons on the PSP is really noticeable — whilst the analog stick moves Ratchet (or Clank) around, you need to switch to the D-Pad to strafe, whilst using the shoulder buttons to control the camera, Square to shoot and X to jump and avoid enemy fire.  Most of the game’s guns don’t lock on to enemies, either, so I often found myself playing with my hands uncomfortably twisted around my PSP struggling to shoot at nothing in particular.

A combination of these poor controls and enemies with a lot of health makes for an incredibly steep difficulty curve.  I think I died more in Size Matters than I’ve died in any other platform game ever.  Worse still, it’s nearly impossible to beat these difficult sections by correcting one’s tactics — rather, the game seems to depend on the fact that experience points carry over between deaths.  Boss too hard?  Just keep trying again and again and again; your weaponry and health will marginally improve each time and eventually you might survive the battle.

Even with all of this constant dying and re-playing of levels, the game is still incredibly short — I completed it in 5 hours — and I couldn’t really recommend it to anybody but hardcore Ratchet & Clank fans.