Jak & Daxter: TPL HD Review

Jak & Daxter: The Precursor Legacy HD

Developer: Naughty Dog
Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment
Platforms: Playstation 3 (PSN/Retail)
ESRB: E for Everyone
What I played: The game’s story (unknown hours), ending at 80-something percent

Jak & Daxter is a classic Playstation 2 game that’s been remade in “HD” and released as part of a bundle pack with its two sequels. The game centers around the mute protagonist Jak and his best friend Daxter, who’s been turned into an ottsel by a substance known as “dark eco”. They set out north to find a pair of Sages that can potentially turn Daxter back to his humanoid form.

Gameplay

Jak & Daxter is a 3D Adventure Platforming game, a popular genre when the PS2 and N64 were the latest consoles. Similar titles include Banjo-Kazooie, Donkey Kong 64 and Super Mario 64, which I will compare against Jak & Daxter. Let’s start with the game’s controls and the characters’ abilities. The player controls Jak, with Daxter perched on his shoulder. Jak’s basic moveset includes a jump - hit twice for a double jump - a dashing punch, a spinning attack and a crouch. The crouch can modify other actions, such as jumping while crouching for a high jump, crouching while moving for a roll, or both for a rolling long jump.

This might be useful if Jak couldn’t already reach the same heights or length using his simpler abilities. The spinning attack is used more often for getting a bit more length on a jump than actual combat. By utilizing the double jump and the spin attack, you’ll get about the same jump length as the long jump, which doesn’t require the room you need for the rolling long jump. The high jump takes more time to set up and perform and doesn’t have as much mid-air control as simply double jumping, which will give you the same height. As such, platforming is very straightforward, requiring little thought aside from timing the jumps. You might not even realize these “advanced” techniques even exist, as the game is almost completely bereft of a tutorial, and doesn’t cover them at all.

Ah! But this is one of the popular 3D platforming games! Surely the platforming will get more interesting as you learn new abilities! Nope. Jak learns no new abilities over the entire game, leaving you with your basic jump, punch and spin. The only trick they throw in is poles to swing on - which only exist in a few places on two or three levels - and blue eco.

This leads into the one interesting thing Jak & Daxter has for its gameplay. Scattered throughout the game are orbs and vents of differently coloured “eco”, which is some kind of magical substance in the world that seems to take on gaseous, energy-based, or liquid forms. As mentioned early on, Daxter was changed into an ottsel by dark eco, which only exists as a plot point and is never used in-game. The rest of the eco variants are used by Jak for various situations, but only work for a period of time, which is given as a timer in the corner of the screen. Blue eco will attract nearby collectibles, such as Precursor Orbs, as well as destroy nearby crates. It also powers some Precursor platforms or panels, which will work as long as Jak is channeling blue eco. Red eco is used to increase Jak’s strength. This can be used to shatter enemy defenses or take out tougher enemies in a single hit. Yellow eco turns Jak’s punch into a projectile shot, which can be used rapidly on the ground, or once mid-air. You can aim it using the first-person “look” mode. These three eco powers will allow you to accomplish a number of tasks throughout the game, but aren’t utilized too often. Usually only for one or two objectives in a level, and most levels will only have one color of eco. The final colour of eco doesn’t give Jak a new power, but instead health - Green eco. These exist as tiny green orbs that drop from enemies and broken crates. Fifty of these green eco orbs will fill up a portion of Jak’s health, although you can find larger orbs that are worth 50 and will immediately fill up a health portion.

This leads me into combat. As mentioned, Jak has two attacks - a dashing punch and a spin attack. Both attacks suffer from a slight delay at the end of the animation, meaning if you don’t land your attack, you’re likely about to get hit. The spinning attack is very close range, and thus the more dangerous of the two. It’s more useful in getting a bit more length out of jumps than combat. The dash attack is only marginally better, in that if you miss, it’s possible that you dashed out of range of the enemy you were attempting to hit. However, if there’s more than one enemy nearby, you’re likely to get hit by him during the delay at the end of the attack animation where you cannot move, jump or attack. This is likely to cause frustration, as Jak only has three portions of health. Each hit will obliterate a portion, and regaining those portions is both annoying and dangerous. Green eco feels rare, despite being dropped by all defeated enemies and crates that seem to be everywhere. This is because enemies and crates most often drop only two orbs of green eco, but can get up to four, if you’re lucky. Occasionally you might find a large orb that will restore a whole portion of health, but these are incredibly rare, possibly one, maybe two, per level. This still wouldn’t be too bad except for the fact that some objectives require you to make your way past a horde of never ending enemies. Considering Jak’s limited combat potential and having only three hits until death, these occasions are pretty much completable only by sheer luck and mashing his punch. Even this would not be much of an issue if the checkpoint system was any good. Each level has only a few checkpoints, and often these checkpoints can be three enemy groups away from wherever you were before, meaning you’re likely down a health or two before reaching the trouble spot.

The objective in the game is to collect power cells to power your Zoomer, which is your transportation to reach a new hub area. Each hub area contains a teleporter, meaning you can get to any previous hub area without driving the Zoomer back and forth. One way to collect power cells is to trade in Precursor Orbs to various parties in the hub worlds. These exist similar to Sonic’s rings or Mario’s coins, but exist as a set amount per level. They’re scattered everywhere, and often in groups, but have no purpose other than turning in for power cells and filling up the game completion percent.

The problem here is easy to see when you compare Jak & Daxter against other popular 3D Platforming/Adventure games. Banjo-Kazooie had Bottles, who would teach you new moves in nearly every world of the game. Mario64 had unique power ups for large areas of the game that had to be unlocked in special side-worlds to use. Heck, DK64 let you control entirely different characters with entirely different ability sets. What does Jak learn? Nothing. The three eco colours are utilized in the first few worlds, and are only useful in very specific situations, and they’re all pretty obvious, especially due to the timed nature of the eco power-ups. Jak shows no growth during the game, and the game suffers for it. Enemies are boring, and platforming is uninspired, often uninteresting, and more than likely annoying due to fighting the camera, as is common in most 3D Platforming/Adventure games.

One interesting thing to note however, is the fact that the entire game world of Jak & Daxter is load-time free. The hub areas flow directly into the worlds and each other with no load times. This was a technical marvel at the time, and still is, as most games even today still have loading times between areas.

Gameplay: 5/10

Story

The main plot line in Jak & Daxter is, of course, finding a way to get Daxter back to normal after being turned into an ottsel. Along with the ottsel situation, Jak and Daxter notice an oddly large group of Lurkers gathering. To solve these mysteries, Jak and Daxter must travel north to find the Dark Eco Sages Gol and Maia. As they go, they come across another mystery - the three Eco Sages of the hub worlds are missing. While this may all sound interesting, it’s pretty much all covered in the first hour of gameplay. For 90% of the game, all you do is go to mostly empty worlds with a few handfuls of enemies until the end of the game where you finally see some more people just before fighting the boss and ending the game. The hub worlds will contain a person or two, but they exist only to turn in your Precursor Orbs for power cells and mostly don’t contain much personality. Not to mention they don’t seem to care that there’s big groups of monsters appearing nor that their Sages have gone missing.

Jak and Daxter have a bit of help along the way from the Green Sage, Samos, and his daughter Keira. Sadly, Samos does little but yell at Jak and - especially - Daxter while Keira doesn’t do much but pop up just long enough to say she’s fixed something. Jak is completely silent, as many main video game heroes are, leaving Daxter to fill in the gaps. Thankfully, he does this wonderfully, and is the only character in the game with pretty much any personality what-so-ever. However, due to the fact that there’s almost no dialogue in the game, even Daxter gets only a few chances to shine. At least he makes great use of his chances.

Story: 3/10

Visuals and Sound

First off, Jak & Daxter is a PS2 game. That means it’s impossible to rate against today’s 1080p-quality games. As such, I’ll try to rate the graphics of the game as closely to it’s original time period as possible. Yes, it’s an “HD Remake”, but that means little, as all they did was up the resolution. Sometimes this can make a game look worse, as the little things no one really noticed are now in hi-def.

Aside from the rest of the game, the visuals in Jak & Daxter aren’t horrible. Mostly. One of the first things you might notice are the characters’ eyes. They were either bad to begin with, or forgotten about during the conversion to HD. They’re basically just coloured ovals on faces that are incredibly blurry and hardly look like eyes at all. Their faces are a bit off too, but the decent animation makes up for it. The style is very cartoony, and they often make use of it, especially with Daxter. Level designs are also visually interesting, and each hub area and world are easily distinguishable from the others. If only the level designs were as interesting.

The sound quality managed to make a good transition to the hi-def realm, as the sound and voice acting is crisp and clear. What little voice acting there is isn’t bad, but even if it was, Max Casella’s work as Daxter would totally make up for it. The level specific music is very background and not that memorable.

Visuals: 8/10
Sound: 9/10

Family Friendly Rating

The game is very family friendly. There’s no real violence, no language, and no sexual content (unless you count Keira’s bare midriff).

FF Rating: 1/10 (10 being highly offensive)

Conclusion

I’m honestly surprised that Jak & Daxter: The Precursor Legacy was so highly praised, and considered one of the best games on the PS2 platform. It lacks features that nearly every other 3D Platforming/Adventure game had, and did practically nothing to make up for it. Gameplay was frustrating more than fun,and there’s barely a story worth talking about. The gameplay also didn’t evolve, change, or grow at all during the game. I haven’t yet tried the sequels, but they can’t be much worse than this.

Final Score: 4/10