After a year of waiting, "Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart" has finally arrived. And it was worth the wait. Combining tight gameplay, an emotional story, and top-notch production values, "Rift Apart" is arguably the best PS5 game ever made.

However, this should come as no surprise to anyone who has played the "Ratchet & Clank" series; what makes "Rift Apart" special is that it finally lives up to its promise more than six months after the PS5's debut.

First, a little background. Sony announced the PS5 in April 2019, but it wasn't until March 2020 that system architect Mark Cerny discussed the hardware details of the console in a live stream. He highlighted two key features that set the PS5 apart from the PS4: SSD for faster load times and 3D audio settings for more immersive sound. A few months later, we would learn about the dual-sense controller.

Rift Apart is by no means the first PS5 game to take advantage of these features, but it feels like the first full-length PS5 game that could never have existed on the PlayStation consoles before it. (Admittedly, the "Astro's Playroom" pack-in had many similar features.) The PS5's fast SSD and sensitive controller allow for gameplay that was never possible on the PS4.

When I first saw Ratchet & Clank, I wrote: When I first saw Rift Apart, I wrote that it was the only game that showed the true power of the PS5. While other titles showcased pretty graphics and ambitious gameplay concepts, only "Rift Apart" showed us what the PS4 could not. In its trailer, Ratchet and Clank ducked through a dimensional portal and emerged seconds later with a fully rendered level.

This is not a simple trailer trick, but a very real part of Rift Apart's gameplay. To be fair, you cannot simply jump freely from level to level. Most of the game's portals move you to distant platforms. However, there is no denying that these level transitions load instantly and play an important role in Rift Apart's gameplay. While the core gameplay of Ratchet & Clank has changed little over the past 19 years, the dimensional rifts would not have worked so seamlessly on previous PlayStation systems.

And then there's the DualSense integration. I have been skeptical of DualSense since day one, and Rift Apart is still an exception in a sea of haptics. But there is no denying that the latest "Ratchet & Clank" makes very smart use of the PS5's quirky controller. The vibrations are suitably varied, from the loud explosion when you fire a rocket launcher, to the sudden burst of sound when your magnetic boots get stuck on the road surface, to the little clicks when you collect a bunch of bolts (the game's currency).

More impressive, however, is how Insomniac took advantage of DualSense's adaptive triggers: in a game like Spider-Man: Miles Morales, adaptive triggers are halfway through without doing justice to the gameplay. The only purpose of adaptive triggers was to lock the game without justifying the gameplay, which was frustrating. In Rift Apart, however, adaptive triggers provide a useful feature for almost every weapon.

For example, if you equip a Shatterbomb and pull the trigger halfway down, the explosive will lock on to nearby enemies. Then, pulling the trigger all the way down allows the weapon to be thrown. This is much more accurate than the way ratchets throw bombs in previous games, meaning that dual sense works to the advantage of actual gameplay. The Executioner shotgun has a single barrel when the trigger is pulled halfway down, and both barrels can be released when the trigger is pulled all the way to the end. From zooming in with a sniper rifle to firing a barrage of shots with a blaster pistol, Rift Apart has finally put adaptive triggers to good use.

The 3D audio also sounds very good--although I'm not sure if it's better than listening to "Ratchet & Clank" (2016) on PS4 with high-quality headphones; Rift Apart has good directional audio and subtle sound effects, but load times and doesn't affect gameplay as much as the DualSense feature. Perhaps the next big PS5 exclusive will also have some significant audio innovation.

It is one thing to argue that Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart takes full advantage of the PS5's unique hardware. It is another to claim that it is better than any other game. But at this point, there are only a handful of true PS5 exclusives, and "Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart" feels more inclusive than those.

To date, there are only five PS5 games that cannot be played on PS4: Astro's Playroom, Demon's Souls, Destruction AllStars, Returnal, and Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart. The "Rift Apart" is the first of its kind in the world. At the risk of being too forward, "Astro's Playroom" and "Destruction AllStars" are not enough to showcase all that PS5 has to offer; "Astro's Playroom" is rather short and limited in scope, while "Destruction AllStars" is the most ambitious game. is not the most ambitious game.

Then there's "Demon's Souls," which until the release of "Rift Apart" was the best game on the PS5. Nevertheless, "Demon's Souls" is a remake of the PS3 game almost verbatim; the PS5 version of "Demon's Souls" is more beautiful, faster, and more accessible than the PS3 version, but it would be inaccurate to say that this game could only exist on PS5.

That leaves Returnal, which offers faster load times and nuanced DualSense feedback, especially with regard to raindrops, given that Returnal's developer, Housemarque, is a fraction of Insomniac's size. This is doubly impressive when one considers that the size of Housemarque, the developer of Returnal, is a fraction of Insomniac's.

Still, while Returnal features near-instantaneous high-speed movement between areas, nothing compares to Rift Apart's dimensional movement. Procedurally generated, Returnal's biome consists of individual "rooms" of modest size compared to Rift Apart's sprawling planet; Returnal's haptics are impressive, but adaptive triggers do little to enhance gameplay.

There is also the fact that Returnal, for all its achievements, is a very niche game. It is thanks to this that Sony can claim that the PS5 is the only place in the world where you can play the world's first major roguelike. But when it comes to accessible crowdfunding, it's generally hard to beat Ratchet & Clank.

Currently, finding a PS5 is more difficult than it needs to be, and Rift Apart's initial audience will be limited. But we hope the system will be widely available by the end of the year so that players can see what happens when the gameplay, the story, and the hardware find the perfect middle ground. And if the PS5 is not quite ready for release, pick up the PS4 version of Ratchet & Clank when it was free.