Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy (Review)

Jak and Daxter kicked of a trio of high profile platformer series for the Playstation 2, the latter two series being Ratchet & Clank and Sly Cooper. I've played the later Jak and Daxter games, but it sure took me a while to get around to playing The original outing. This game didn't really change my opinion of the series though. Now don't get me wrong, I think it's a solid platformer, but I just can not figure out why some people believe this series is better than Ratchet or Sly. The only think Jak has over Sly is writing and storyline, while the storyline manages to be the only thing to trump Ratchet (well...the PS2 entries in the series anyway). The Jak and Daxter games are just more frustrating, suffer from imprecise controls, and are just less polished...sort of.

The first game is more of standard platformer in comparison to the sequels. It's sort of a hybrid of Crash Bandicoot and Super Mario 64. Developer Naughty Dog gave Jak and Daxter pretty much all the same moves they gave Crash when they developed that series, while the gameplay has you going around doing various tasks to earn orbs that allow you to move on to next level a la Mario 64. While the game gets the job done, there are some things that shouldn't have made through the testing phase, such as the double jump which seems to be too specific about it's timing, a picky-ness that sent me to my death more times than necessary. Most enemies serve no other purpose than to piss you off when you're trying to do other things and the enemies are fairly often placed in cheap as hell locations. It also doesn't help that Jak has a stupid method of restoring health. He can take 3 hits before he dies, but can regain one health point by collect 50 green eco orbs that, while plentiful, oddly takes too damn long to full up and makes death seem like faster option to get your health back.

Okay, I'm being a little hard on the game... despite all this bitching, I really did enjoy this game. It just that all those annoyances really make it hard to not be a little irritated will going through it. The world Naughty Dog has created is colorful and fun to run around in. The story and characters, while not on par with the sequels, are somewhat entertaining and actually managed to make me laugh sometimes, though the game is definitely not as clever as it thinks. The game could have been developed a bit more, but it's still a solid platformer.