There were many times I wanted to just give up on this game, but didn’t.
Jak & Daxter (hereafter Jak 1) was the perfect platformer; Jak 3 was an excellent game – not my favorite, but definitely had many memorable moments… Jak 2 really had no relation to Jak 1 other than the titular characters, and was clearly rife with issues that Jak 3 handily resolved.
It’s a weapons based game. You’d think that the weapon based combat would be tightly done. Nope. More often than not, you’d be at the mercy of the game’s gun AI to hit the thing you’re aiming towards.
The lack of checkpoints were infuriating. Not because it made the game harder, but there were oftentimes stupid and trivial events that you’d have to repeat because the developers were incredibly… stupid? cruel? irritating?
There were moments of absolute brilliance that spurred me on. For instance, the mission of two trials was brilliantly paced, there were memorable moments of both weapon combat and platforming, and the resulting boss battle was fun.
The moments of brilliance were few and far between, sadly. The developers clearly liked certain sorts of events, and kept reusing them. For instance, being chased by a giant enemy was done four times through the course of the game. The escort events were repeated almost a dozen times. Race events were yawn inducing and were done four times. That’s a significant number of missions that are just the same exact thing.
All this could be forgiven if the game weren’t so buggy. Weird clipping, aforementioned gun issues, poor handling of the vehicles (the physics of those vehicles made no sense and weren’t wholly consistent) – all these things added up to a frustrating experience.
I’m not one to shy away from difficult games. I thought R&C was as hard as this game, but R&C didn’t have these weird bugs (ironically, since the game was built on the Jak engine). I love Mario 2 (Japan), and thoroughly enjoyed the Red Star, for instance. The difficult of Jak 2 wasn’t so much that the game was hard but that you’re at the mercy of the funky physics, and forced to repeat inane events just to get back to where you died. - Had I not finished Jak 3, I would’ve never gone back to this game. The sole reason for coming back to this game was to explain the events in Jak 3. It’s imperative to note that while Jak 2 itself is pretty awful (relative to the other two in the trilogy), the story arc is quite fascinating. I’m a big fan of time travel and steam punk, and filling in the story line details made it worth beating this game. Mostly, I’m just glad to have it done and out of the way. If we’re doing scores, Jak 1 gets a 10/10, Jak 3 gets a 8.5/10, and Jak 2 gets a 6/10. As a point of reference, R&C would get a 7/10. — I’m looking forward to finishing Boom Blox with Lisa, now. She’s quite good at that game. Related posts:
