Game- Jak and Daxter- The Precursor Legacy
Okay, first review! Let’s get right down to business. Jak and Daxter is a fun cartoony title from the glory days of the Playstation 2, which should tip you off that this is a RETROSPECTIVE, like much else on this site. As it is a FUCKING OLD game, I’m going to scream “spoiler alert” at the top of my lungs now, and let it echo throughout the rest of the review. Ready? SPOILER ALERT! Got it? Good. Moving on.
Okay so the game starts with a cutscene, and it does a
fairly good start. The guy you don’t
recognize falls into Dark Eco, a particularly evil flavor of the local McGuffin,
and gets turned into the fuzzy orange weasel on the cover. Daxter, the aforementioned orange fluffball,
rides around on Jak’s shoulder doing most of the talking, exposition, and
attitude etc. so that Jak can focus on doing all the fucking work. Not to mention he’d say something snarky
whenever you died, which I thought was a nice touch. All in all the game plays like a fairly
decent action platformer aimed at a young audience. It’s a colorful adventure whose play style
brings to mind a semi-sandboxed version of Crash Bandicoot, which is rather
fitting since the two shared a developer.
Eco, the local McGuffin, comes in a few different
flavors. Green eco is the energy of
life, so it unsurprisingly fills your health bar. Blue eco is the energy of motion, and it
allows Jak to move really fast and power up precursor doodads lying around the
environment. Those are the important two
that you’ll find freaking everywhere. There’s
more kinds like yellow which is fireballs and red which is power boost, but
they’re a little on the arbitrary side.
Less puzzle solving elements and more random powerups to spice up the
gameplay. The real important ecos are
Dark Eco, a purple form of pure concentrated corruption, and Light Eco, whose existence and properties are shrouded in mystery.. Light eco DOES
make an appearance in the final boss battle.
It manifests as the thing you have to absorb to hurt big bad.
And now the annoying stuff.
The game’s plot coupons are Precursor crap. Artifacts from a bygone civilization that are
somehow still useful to this day. The Precursors apparently had antigrav tech and a copper fetish, because they all
float and they’re all brown metal. Precursor
orbs, which are actually egg shaped, serve no purpose aside from letting you
trade them to all the local folk in the hub cities for Power Cells, which look like
atoms and let you power up the random doodads that let you freaking move
on. There is a bonus for
100% completion, IE getting ALL of these fuckers, but it is not the least bit worth it.
It’s a 5 second video clip that reveals nothing but an overly ambiguous sequel
hook that will make you throw your controller at the screen in rage.
The story’s good though, and big bad Gahl Akheron, the dark
eco sage that supposedly could have changed Daxter back into an elf, was in
fact trying to take over the world, which ramps up the stakes quite a bit. The difficulty curve works, and the plot
coupons actually come off as necessary rather than arbitrary. Lord only knows what they need all the copper
eggs for. Maybe Easter’s right around
the corner and everyone wants to be ready in case the apocalypse doesn’t happen
after all. All in all it’s a good kid
game. Simple controls, pretty colors, and a nice happy ending with big smiley faces for all. Except Daxter. He's an orange weasel forever.
Score: 7/10
Pass/Fail: Pass
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