Jak 3

"Well it's better than Jak 2 but it's still got alot of problems"

So here it is, the third and very possibly final game in the Jak & Daxter series. It's been a rough road but I think they finally got it right or at least acceptably close. Being that I am reviewing a game that serves as a finale for a series I think it's I examine the previous two.

Jak & Daxter first made their debut in a high quality Mario 64 clone way back when the PS2 was fairly young, it was fun to play but short and way too easy. It involved a young man named Jak who never spoke. His friend Daxter had been transformed into a squirrel like critter called an Ottsol after having a run in with a pool of stuff called dark eco which resulted in the two of them going on a quest to save the world from some dudes who wanted to do bad things with the previously mentioned dark eco and hopefully find a cure for Daxter. It introduced the plot about the precursors, an ancient civilization of mysterious beings who had built the planet the characters lived on.

From there the series took a very bizarre turn with Jak 2. Apparently someone at Sony or Naughty Dog or both decided to totally retool the franchise, this decision no doubt had something to do with money and some corporate jackass giving a speech about how they should be marketing to a certain demographic. In any case the peaceful cartoon world of Jak and Daxter was substituted with an oppressive distopian city constantly under siege by freaky bug demons from outer space, not exactly a smooth transition and the young series showed some scars for it. The gameplay also shifted away from exploration/collection based platforming moving instead into a cross between Grand Theft Auto and Ratchet & Clank. Problem is it didn't do either gameplay style even close to as well as the games it was imitating. The GTA side of it involved very weak flying cars with poor handling moving about in extremely small ultra congested streets, it was very frustrating and the layout of the city made getting around a very time consuming process to boot. The R&C imitation suffered as well primarily from the controls having been originally designed for an exploration/collection based platformer, it had only four weapons and no manual aim or strafe abilities making shooting enemies while not getting clobbered very tough. In addition the storyline of Jak 2 was made to be as “edgy” as it's creators could manage. The result of this was that a once well mannered Jak was locked into a crappy Snake Plissken impression and all the characters tended to act as purposely anti-social as possible. Problem was it resembled a bunch of middle school kids trash talking and trying to look tough much more than it did the whole badasses talking trash and looking tough thing they were going for.

So now we have Jak 3, the first two were good games but not great ones. Is Jak 3 a great game? No, but I would say it's the best out of the three and comes fairly close.

Graphics
Jak 3 is a very pretty game, the environments are very detailed and the character models are amazing. All the cutscenes are made with the in game engine using these character models and it looks better than most CG cutscenes. Not to be crude but there is one example that stands out in my mind, at one point in the game Tess hugs Daxter and her breasts actually change shape realisticly as she holds him tightly. Also when viewing character models I was unable to spot any single polygon, the detail is that high. You can tell they put a lot of time into this stuff and the result is a game that feels a lot more alive than it would otherwise. The effects are great too, sandstorms, lighting effects and so forth. Bottom line is these graphics are pretty much as good as they could be. Jak & Daxter is a series that always has strived for great graphics but a new standard is set here.

Sound
Much improved over Jak 2, the music has a much more epic kind of quality about it whereas Jak 2 had this really broody stuff that was unpleasant to the ears after a few minutes if that long. Voice acting is also much improved over Jak 2, there were only a few times where Jak seemed to fall into his cliche'd troubled anti-hero routine. The voice work seems much less strained and the characters managed to convey things other than how unpleasant they could act in relation to one another. Daxter's writing especially has improved significantly whereas I thought he was totally obnoxious in Jak 2 he was very funny in Jak 3 at least half the time.

Gameplay
The game plays like Jak 2 only better. Most of the game takes place on foot with you running around shooting the opposition. You'll get eight new upgrades for Jak's morph rifle thingy. A much better auto aim is now present the developers finally realizing that without strafing and manual aim that auto aiming is a must. For the most part the new weapon modes are a bit overpowered unlike Jak 2 where your weapons were underpowered. Couple the superpowerful new weapons with a great auto aim and what seemed like weaker enemies overall and the shooting portions quickly become way too easy. However I found myself liking this more than the often totally unfair and always clunky shooting sections of Jak 2. The game also punishes you much less for kicking the bucket. The sad thing though is what they really should have done was admitted to themselves that the control scheme is inappropriate for a third person shooter and rebuilt it from the ground up to allow for strafing and at least some level of manual aim. I mean if you're going to make a third person shooter build it to control like one for crying out loud! Instead they just kind of did a quick fix and turned the difficulty way down.

A little less than half of the game however is about driving through a large desert in Road Warrior style dune buggy things. Each Vehicle is different and has different physics to it and while these vehicles often seemed a little floaty I thought that driving them was probably the better major portion of the game. Tearing through the desert looking for my next objective and blasting the crap out of enemy vehicles and giant metal heads was a lot of fun. Variety is the name of the game though and you'll experience lots of different
gamplay types throughout the game which I don't want to spoil for you.

The things I saw the most improvement in between Jak 2 and Jak 3 is navigating the environments. Out in the desert dune buggies are king. In the new city you go to streets are wide and large birds can be ridden to decrease travel time. Only a small portion of Haven City returns and traffic is cut almost down to nill allowing you to move about freely and without much hassle, better yet this is easily explained by the storyline.

The worst thing about the gameplay however is that to get the unlockibles you have to play these stupid and unfun mini games that are mostly just memorizing the environment and then getting to precursor orbs before they disappear. I got about a sixth of the orbs and I was already totally sick of the process. I only did it because it allowed me to get otherwise unattainable weapon upgrades which helped me out a lot in a few places.

Story
They are telling the truth in the commercials, pretty much everything important is explained here. You will learn the last bits of Jak's origin, you will meet the Precursors, you'll see whether Daxter gets those pants or not and in the end the world is saved pretty conclusively. It has a few issues though, for starters the game lacks a really great primary villain, the real villain is more of a big ominous thing in outer space and it lacks any sort of personality. Therefore it feels more like stopping a natural disaster than it does like thwarting the bad guys. The two villains who try and stop you are just a pair of incompetents playing with stuff they don't understand but have deluded themselves into thinking they can control. Also Keira plays an almost nonexistent part in the story, she only has about two lines and spends her time fading into the background. That's just plain dumb considering she's supposed to be the love interest for Jak. The two of them should be kissing by the end of the game but they never even so much as make eye contact. Also there's a certain plot point near the very end of the game where Jak discovers something very important, I saw it coming from about a half hour into the game. Overall though the story is much more interesting and funny than either of the previous games in the series and I was mostly entertained.

Conclusion
So should you buy Jak 3? Personally I don't think so, it only took me twelve and a half hours to finish and there are a lot better games that have come out this month. If I were you I'd concern myself with Halo 2, GTA San Andreas, Ratchet & Clank 3, Metal Gear Solid 3 and Metroid Prime 2 before I'd buy Jak 3. Considering it's length however renting Jak 3 makes more sense, that's what I did and managed to squeeze it in between finishing San Andreas and playing Halo 2 on Xbox Live to boot.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 11/29/04, Updated 02/15/05