It's not been that long since our valiant heroes, mechanic Ratchet and his diminuitive robot sidekick, Clank, were thrust into an epic adventure upon which the fate of their whole galaxy hung, as they battled to foil Chairman Drek's nefarious scheme. And now they're back, with a whole new galaxy threatening adventure to tackle and a variety of worlds to explore.

Our story begins six months after the last one ended, with Ratchet and Clank lazily basking in the glory of their victory against Drek. Now galaxy-renowned heroes, they have enjoyed their time off but are a little restless and itching for a new challenge. Meanwhile in the distant galaxy of Bogon, the head of huge company Megacorp, the strangely named Abercrombie Fizzwidget, is in need of just such heroes and he summons the intrepid pair to his ship to ask for their help. They accept the task and two weeks later Ratchet has been fully trained and is outfitted in a swanky new spacesuit and ready for action.

As far as platform games go they don't get much better than this and indeed only the recent Jak II: Renegade is equal to this game's outstanding quality and gameplay. Whilst Clank is living it up in a luxury apartment in Megapolis, Ratchet takes a trip to the swamp planet of Oozla, where he must investigate the abandoned Megacorp store. The familiar loading screens of Ratchet speeding through the galaxy to his destination planet appear (this is the only loading break in the whole game and it fits in so nicely with the presentation that effectively there are no loading times, as we've come to expect from the very finest in platform games). He lands on Oozla and immediately we are greeted with a familiar, yet new, sight. The landscape stretches out into the distance all around, the scenery is teeming with detail and nice graphical touches, plus there is a very convincing effect of heavy rain, which is completed by the sound of rain falling.

Ratchet heads off down one of the two paths on offer and the first enemies you come up against are jungle animals, which is a refreshing change as the first game featured almost entirely robots or aliens with guns to go up against. The funny mammals are easy enough to dispatch, then a massive, snail-like creature with one eye on a stalk and four tentacles with claws on the end attacks me. It successfully hits me and in celebration it clamps its two pairs of claws together and shakes them in the air, a sly look on its single eye! This is so amusing and such a nice touch that from hereon in I try to remember to let each new enemy I come across hit me at least once, just to see what happens and this is just one of the many nice touches that this game is absolutely brimming with.

Soon I find I can't go any further without jumping onto the flat back of a strange creature water with a long neck and a bizarre head and face, that is floating in the water. I jump on and with a groan it goes swimming over to another creature, I hop to the other and it swims me to the far shore. I then come to a big lake where there are a number of these creatures and a series of jumping from one to the other (with a couple of extra destinations with secrets to find) and I'm through. When I reach the Megacorp store itself I find that it is very overgrown with vines and exotic looking jungle plants and the music changes to the kind of cheesy store music that you expect to find in malls and elevators. This raised a real chuckle and after killing the bugs that were buzzing around I had the chance to try out one of the brand new gadgets I'd picked up - the Dynamo. This device delivers a charge of green energy to wall mounted devices, which in turn activates a glowing, translucent platform that rises into the air. I hop on and use the Dynamo again, activating another platform that I jump onto and this one glides across the room and to a ledge I couldn't have reached otherwise. The next set of devices I activate create energy conveyer belts that I jump across on and the Dynamo is used throughout the game to navigate increasingly tricky series of temporary moving ledges that you must activate as you go.

Inside the main store there are robot dummies dressed with clothes and all manner of futuristic looking vases on the shelves - as smashing each provides you with valuable bolts (the game's currency) I use my Omniwrench to smash all within reach and then go into the first person view to use my Lancer (a powerful weapon that rapid fires laser blasts) to shoot the rest. As I shoot the final vase I am awarded a Skill Point and after checking the Special menu in the option screen, I discover that I have fulfilled one of 30 skill point challenges that are scattered throughout the game. The catch here though is that the details of each challenge aren't displayed until after you beat it - all you've got as a clue are a cryptic name for the challenge and the planet it's to be found on. This means that completing all of these challenges is seriously tough and some of them will take a lot of head scratching to figure out. The skill points unlock a bunch of fun features, like giving Ratchet a big head or putting him in a very slick looking James Bond style tuxedo outfit!

At the end of this level you find a lead that takes you to a Space Casino in the Maktar Nebula. This is in total contrast to Oozla and is very spectacular - stood on the deck of a massive and elaborate looking space station you can see the stars and planets all around. It is on this level that you will see some of the gorgeous animation of the breakable objects. As there is so much to buy, every level is packed with parts of the scenery that can be destroyed to get gold bolts and here the edges of all the walkways have various kinds of lamps and posts that can be smashed up. Larger things like spotlights and floating signs explode and the wreckage bounces and scatters everywhere. On this level the Tractor Beam comes into its own - this is a gadget you picked up on Oozla that can move certain objects around using a bendy energy beam - with a series of puzzles where you must manoeuvre a sentry robot onto a security pad by dragging it around. You also get to fire bombs with it using an energy catapult device. It's all just so cool.

The first moon planet level can be reached from here too. This is a small satellite that you can walk all the way around and instead of a 2D map to view you actually see a scaled view of the whole satellite and it looks seriously excellent. On this satellite you must jam the communications device belonging to the Thugs-4-Less organisation and you do this by destroying a series of devices. There are jumps that send you very high into the air and you leap from one mounted platform to the next, smashing the robots guarding the place and turning screws to get at the devices. The music has been very catchy and funky so far and I'm pleased to say that the pace and variety of the music remains an excellent standard throughout, enhancing the game experience significantly.

The first mini-game is available in Maktar as well - the Combat Arena. Here you can enter a series of challenges that earn you bolts and they range from straight out survival (as wave after wave of enemy is brought in) to timed, limited shot, single weapon, no damage and there are even a couple of excellent bosses to defeat - a massive beastly warrior with a huge gun and a bizarre robot with metal tentacles and a glass bowl with a big brain in its centre. The arena looks lovely - you can see the audience all around and pods are brought in to deposit each wave of enemy. You can even hear the cheering of the crowd (they love it when you take a hit) and there is a commentator too, saying things like "ooh, I don't care what galaxy you're from, that's got to hurt!" The challenges are great fun too and give you a chance to try out all your new weapons, of which there are many to find or (sadly in most cases) buy.

Even though the original game had such a range of wonderful gadgets and weapons, Locked And Loaded simply blows them away in every respect. There is such a range here and every weapon looks lovely, from the way it expands from nowhere to the varied and spectacular firing effects and explosions. Combat with a number of enemies is always visually stunning and there's so much happening on screen, from the colourful shots of enemies firing at you to the variety of energy blasts and explosions your weapons create. Just a few of the weapons on offer include Mini-Bomb, Ninja Star, which fires bladed stars that spin at enemies, Seeker Gun, which fires cool looking explosive probes that charge at enemies at high speed, Miniturret Gun that creates a mini gun turret that fires at all enemies within range, Lava Gun that fires a stream of molten lava (the graphical effect of this is awesome), plus more unusual weapons like the Synthenoid, which releases four sentinel droids that fly around with you and attack enemies and the Spiderbot Glove, which launches a controllable spider that you have 30 seconds to move into position and detonate. The Spiderbot is dead handy for scouting out new terrain as well as sneaking around enemy strongholds and taking them out from behind. The weapons are not only graphically lovely, they all sound wonderful too from the clanks, blasts, smashes and explosions to the whir of machinery or whine of hoverbike engines. The voice acting is excellent too, with a very witty script that will have you chuckling in almost every one of the many cut scenes.

The next planet you visit is Barlow, a rocky, barren world with a huge mining operation in progress. It is here that you get new Grindboots and find the Thermanator, a very cool gadget that can freeze water and melt ice and there are some great level layouts that put this to good use. You also get to race against the Desert Riders in a high-speed hoverbike race, another entertaining mini-game. The Feltzin System is where you have your first dogfight with two waves of Thugs-4-Less ships. This level is graphically one of the most spectacular ones, set in a dense asteroid field around a massive space station. You fly your ship around, blasting enemies with your lasers and homing missiles and as you collect Raritanium from enemy ships and certain types of asteroid you can use them to upgrade the ship, buying better shields, thrusters and weapons, with mines, torpedoes and even nukes coming into play. You can even buy different paint jobs and wing styles for your ship - my personal favourite is the super sleek Drek's Black Heart style.

Everything I've talked about is just a taster of the imaginative variety of gameplay on offer and no two levels are repetitious in the tasks you must navigate your way through or the theme and scenery on offer, complete with unique enemies and aliens lifeforms of all shapes and sizes to fight. There are also several levels were Clank (who comes into the game on the next level at Megapolis City) must navigate some tricky areas alone, using a variety of bots to help him, including bots that build bridges and can hammer objects to destroy them. Giant Clank also returns and there is a level set on a tiny moon where you battle against a giant robot suit, whilst blasting attacking helicopters and levelling every building in sight, Godzilla style! The fun and variety really is neverending and I could give far more details on Clank's exploits, but I don't want to spoil all the fun of discovering it for yourself.

Ratchet looks very cool in his new suit but this is more than just an aesthetic touch - every enemy you kill leaves behind nanites (microscopic robots) which your suit absorbs and this fills up an energy bar shown beneath the on-screen health display. When the bar fills you get one more block of health added to your capacity and by the time you are halfway through the game you'll have far more health than the maximum in the first game. Don't think this makes it too easy though, because as you progress the enemies become tougher to kill and their attacks take off big chunks of your health.

The Megacorp weapons collect nanites as you use them and a bar gradually fills up until they transform into a more powerful variety - thus the Miniturret Gun becomes a Megaturret Gun, dropping a turret that fires powerful homing missiles and the Ninja Star becomes the Multi Star, firing blades that break into multiple blades on contact, which fly around and return to the enemy like boomerangs. Every Megacorp weapon has an enhanced mode and this encourages you to use the whole range of weapons to find out what the enhanced version is like - and the result is never a disappointment! You can even use the hidden Platinum bolts you find to modify your enhanced weapons, the ways in which I'll leave you to discover.

As the game progresses the scenery and enemies give you bolts worth more and more, which is fortunate as the amount you have to save up to get every weapon and armour upgrade is almost absurd. Thankfully some of the weapons from the first game can be bought (including the RYNO) and if you bought them in the first game, Locked And Loaded can read your save file and you get them for free, which is a lovely touch.

The difficulty curve of Locked And Loaded is perfectly pitched and it gets gradually harder as the game progresses, with the final levels providing a serious challenge that will require every ounce of your concentration and quick reactions to beat. This is without a doubt gaming at its finest and the variety of the platform action and mini-games on offer keeps things so fresh and varied that you'll simply never get bored. It also makes this one of the few platform games out there that is so much fun you'll want to come back to it and play through it again, although finishing it completely will take you a very long time anyway, simply because of the amount of things to unlock and secrets to discover.

After I was about three quarters of the way through the game, I decided to go back to the beginning and have a little look around the first few levels to see what I missed. Back on Oozla I realised that I hadn't jumped on the back of the very first of those swamp creatures I came across and I jumped on. It swam a good long distance through the swamp water, taking me to a cave within which I found a platinum bolt I'd missed. I didn't find anything else of interest until I came across a ramp in the Megacorp store that I couldn't walk up before. With my Gravity Boots I could now walk up it and at the top I found a vendor and a tunnel. I topped up my ammo then dived in. I slid down the tunnel and out into a massive cave, where a gigantic beast was swimming around, looking like a massive version of the snail creatures outside. Jumping from lily pad to lily pad, avoiding the creature's various attacks, I shot it with half the weapons from my arsenal before I finally defeated it (it nearly killed me too, despite how much nanotech I started off with).

The item I got for defeating this boss is the Box Breaker, which allows you to destroy not only all nearby boxes but all destructible scenery too, simply by leaping into the air and smashing down your wrench. This is just one example of the really cool things hidden away on each level - what other game would have a valuable but non-essential item like that with a huge boss to defeat to get it, hidden in some obscure corner of the first level? The level designs are simply unparalleled and so well put together, with Jak II again being the only real competition. There simply is nothing to be said in criticism of this game; the only possible problem is that in some places it can be very tough to get through and there might not be quite enough continue points for your liking, but that's less of a fault and more of a tough challenge.

Ratchet & Clank 2: Locked And Loaded jumps straight into the action and doesn't let up throughout. All of the humour, fun, gameplay, kooky characters, variety, mini-games, ingenious level designs and super-imaginative weapons and gadgets of the first game are here but everything has been sufficiently enhanced, evolved and reinvented to create a whole new game. It improves upon the excellent original in every respect, with beautiful visuals, strong sound and a catchy soundtrack, plus loads of quirky new characters and a light-hearted entertaining story with a few twists to it. Every PS2 owner must buy this; it will surely convert even the staunchest platform game hater with its wily charms and sublime gameplay.

Reviewed by Geoff Holland for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).