The missions Clank has to do often dovetail neatly into the Qwark missions which involve him making up lies to his biographer about how he took down the baddy that Clank eliminated himself. It’s funny in that it shows how big a phony Qwark is, but it can lose its humor fast because Qwark’s need to over dramatize his fights can lead to some really tough bosses. It wouldn’t be so bad if you had the option to avoid them, but sadly, you cannot. Appreciate them for the humor content they sometimes afford you. By and large, though, the missions are only a small part of the game as you’ll spend much of your Secret Agent Clank experience playing mini-games of various kinds. These run the gambit from rhythm games where you have a to hit a series of buttons in a certain order to safely move Clank from one side of a laser filled room to the other, snowboarding down a snowy mountain side while moving pursuers into rocks, trees, and high explosive munitions, or performing one the of the most dangerous tangos ever seen anywhere. Clank has singlehandedly shown up Al Pacino.

The graphics really have some impressive areas to them, such as the massive neon signs you have to cut through to turn into bridges, or the deadly areas Clank must navigate through using the triangle, circle, square, and X keys. By and large, though, the game is not a stunning graphical experience but it’s solid, dependable, and sometimes very flashly; such is the case in a boss battle with <IDENTITY CLASSIFIED> who has an attack that consists of throwing large amounts of playing cards at you. If you hid behind a pillar to protect yourself, the cards will embed themselves in random spots all over the pillar before disappearing. Quite neat.

The controls were a source for worry at the start, but Secret Agent’s Clank’s developer made it much easier then it could have been. The analog stick on the PSP is used for movement, the triangle, square, circle, and X buttons are used for interaction and for inventory management, and the shoulder buttons swivel the camera right and left. The manual camera is often the flaw in the ointment of the controls: it’s not easy to sneak up on someone when you have to worry about turning the game around while tracking a moving target. Still, with a bit of luck and a lot of care, you can get through the obstacles without too much difficulty.