Jak X: Combat Racing

"Chasing An Unattainable Dream"

It's a sad thing when the one year time table to get sequels out shows its effects. Jak X is a game that needed at least another six months to a year of development time. It's fun for a short while, but soon the game's defects really start to show themselves. A lot more tweaking and fine tuning should have been done before Jak unleashed his vehicles of mass destruction upon the world. Despite this, Naughty Dog managed to conjure up a fairly impressive game with a decent, if not engrossing, story.

The game is combat racing. The unfortunate truth is that it does neither racing nor combat very well. You find out real quick that the game emphasizes weapon usage over racing prowess, something which I have been fighting ever since I started the game because I'm use to relying on racing skill to win races. Moving up in the pack only results in your getting punished by the slower vehicles behind you with one weapon barrage after another. Move into first place during a race and the game will hit you again and again with an unavoidable Peace Maker attack that destroys your vehicle with one hit. What am I supposed to do, race poorly? Drive slower? Let people pass me so I can hit THEM from behind? But that doesn't work, because your opponents always seem to be the ones nabbing the really powerful weapons, while you are most often stuck with the submachine gun and tracking missiles, both weak weapons that require several hits to destroy an opponent. Furthermore, your opponents' vehicles are much better armored than yours are. I once hit an opponent with three tracking missile salvos and it didn't destroy his vehicle. The game also punishes the player for dropping rear mounted weapons. Rather than get opponents off your tail, it usually has the effect of making them angry and more aggressive. Drop an oil slick or a mine on the track and within one or two seconds your vehicle will get blown to bits by some missile that comes out of nowhere. The game also cheats, having an opponent that you just blew up two seconds ago annihilate your car. I've also seen an opponent's health bar magically refill itself right as I'm coming up on their tail, and there wasn't a health icon anywhere near. The upshot of all of this is that I don't know how the hell I'm supposed to play this game. To race, or to use weapons: neither one seems to really work. It's like there's some kind of mysterious middle way of playing this game that you have to figure out if you want to be successful.

In regards to the weapons, that's one area where the game is lacking in general. The weapons just aren't cool enough. The strength of any car combat game is the variety of the weapons, how they look and sound, and what they do when they hit their target. Although Jak X emphasizes weapon usage, the weapons themselves are boring. They don't have enough personality to make you say, "hey, these are awesome weapons and I want to get good at using all of them!" Take games like Motor Mayhem and Roadkill, for instance. The weapons in those games were the star of the show. Each one had a distinctive look, feel, and effect, and it didn't take long to pick out your favorites and get really good at using them. Jak X doesn't accomplish this sense of excitement for the weapons. Part of the reason for this is you usually get the weak weapons that don't do crap; the other part of it is that the weapons themselves are under-developed. Most of the forward mounted weapons are very weak and lacking in visual flare, and the only thing your rear mounted weapons are good for is deflecting an incoming missile hit. Even the shields very rarely do you any good. Once in a while you'll be rewarded with a powerful forward weapon, like the Supernova or the Peace Maker, but not very often. Furthermore, the game doesn't allow you to stock pile weapons or ammo on your vehicle. If you collect a Yellow Eco weapon, that's all you get: that one weapon with x amount of ammo. It doesn't matter how many more Yellow Eco icons you drive through--you won't get anything else until you use up the weapon you have and drive through another icon. I thought we should at least be able to increase our ammo count by driving through more icons of the same color. The game warns the player against hoarding a weapon. "Use up the weapon you have and grab another one as quickly as you can," it recommends. But when I can't get close enough to an opponent to use it, what the heck am I supposed to do, fire it off into the air and hope I get to another weapon icon real quick? The bottom line is that the whole weapon dynamic really doesn't work like it should. The weapons are weak, they don't have enough ammo, and they clearly show a bias in favor of the cpu opponents.

In regards to the control, the cars are way too floaty for my liking. I think I spend more time flying through the air than actually racing on the track. It's not just the cars that contribute to the floatiness, however. The tracks and arenas themselves are designed in such a way that it's almost impossible to keep your car on the ground for an extended period of time. It's hard enough to navigate some of these tracks when you have full traction; when you're being launched into the air constantly it becomes an exercise in futility. Some of the vehicles can't turn worth crap, which renders the advantages they DO have, such as great speed or acceleration, worthless. There are a few tracks that defy all attempts to handle them no matter what set of wheels you try. The Spargus and Haven City circuit races are absolute nightmares to navigate, and some of the arenas that host artifact races and deathmatches were designed by people who hate gamers and want to see them die of frustration and anger. How many times have I been sooo close to nabbing that artifact in an artifact race, and then when the prize is in sight, I hit a bump or rock in the terrain and flip-dip-deedo goes my car all over the place, while somebody else grabs the prize as my vehicle takes a full minute (or so it seems) to reset itself.

The control isn't always a pain in the butt, however. If you have the right track, car, and set of tires, and if the cpu opponents decide to go a bit easy on you, the control can feel pretty good. Powersliding in particular feels great, and the sense of speed is incredible. This game is all about getting sideways through the turns and then using a turbo boost to come out of it. Once you start getting good at it, navigating the tracks (or at least some of the tracks, with some of the cars and some of the tires) becomes a thing of beauty. The really cool thing is that powersliding and air time fill up your boost meter, so if you handle your car right you can be boosting almost all of the time. It really is an exhilarating feeling flying down the track and nailing the turns just right. For most of the cars they got the basic mechanics of steering, braking, and powersliding down pretty well. It's just that there are a lot of car/tire/track combinations that don't work at all. You have to do a lot of experimenting in Exhibition Mode with different cars, tires, and tracks to see what works best for the event you are trying to win. Not exactly fun, but at least you're becoming better at the game while you do it.

Just as in the previous three games, Jak X has very high quality cut scenes that advance the story. One big disappointment for me, however, is that Jak X doesn't allow the player to pause these beautiful cut scenes. This has always been one of the cool things about the Jak series in the past: that you could pause cut scenes anytime you wanted without the screen going dark and see your favorite characters in your favorite moments, frozen in time (the first-person shot of Tess' boobs in Jak 2). It's baffling to me why they chose to leave this option out of Jak X. It may not be very important to many people, but to me it was a big letdown. On the positive side, the story actually works well despite the fact that this is a racer. It's not as epic or captivating as Jak 2 and 3's narratives, but it does manage to provide a good explanation of why these characters are here competing in these events. There are some elements that come across as forced (such as why certain characters are there), and Keira's involvement in the story is minimal, but at least the whole Jak/Ashelin/Keira love triangle thing is finally brought to a definitive resolution. Yes, I know who Jak ends up with, and if you play the game, so will you. About the huge question left at the end of Jak 3--How can Jak be Mar?--the game doesn't even touch upon it. The only big story element from past games addressed in Jak X is Krew and his diabolical schemes.

Tess makes no appearance, sadly, which is odd because it was made very clear at the end of Jak 3 that her and Daxter were permanently hooked up. I mean, Tess becomes an Ottsel for pete's sake. Maybe Tess had a change of heart, or maybe she decided to stay behind in Haven City and work on their white picket fence while Daxter went off to Kras to hear Krew's will.

Ashelin's dialogue is very heavily laden with sexual innuendo, so much so that I think they overdid it. I would give some examples here, but Gamefaqs is so extremely touchy about content that my review probably wouldn't be accepted if I did. It's pretty obvious that Naughty Dog wanted to push the sexual angle with Ashelin. I like that type of thing, but they push it so much in the game it makes Ashelin sound like a naughty little **insert word here that the Gamefaqs censor won't let me type**. But there is one thing about Ashelin that is vastly improved in Jak X: her breasts. Bigger, better modeled, and now with jiggle physics! That alone is worth the forty dollar price tag for me. I wish Naughty Dog would do a game that is nothing but Ashelin doing jumping jacks.

Graphically the game is very pleasing. The cars and the environments look very sweet, and contain a sharpness and level of detail I didn't expect to see in a racer that moves this fast. The environments are rendered so well they could be used in another Jak platformer/adventure game. There are even some throwbacks to old environments from the first Jak game, like Snowy Mountain and the Volcanic Crater. Although these races take place in Kras City, a location Jak fans have never seen before, there's no mistaking that this is the same world we have come to know and love. It retains the look and feel of Jak's world while at the same time giving us some new locations we might not expect to see, such as a Loading Dock. The sun, or suns, still move across the sky, and you'll notice the time of day changing if you have to try an event repeatedly to win. Crash animations are done very well with a nice slowdown effect, but the drivers are mysteriously absent from these animations. You won't see anyone being ejected from their car and rolling down the track with limbs akimbo, or burning to a crisp inside a twisted mass of flaming wreckage. That would warrant a Mature rating, which Naughty Dog probably didn't want.

The visual effects for weapons aren't that great, as I stated earlier. The only weapon that looks really cool is the submachine gun when your car is powered up with Dark Eco. Purple streaks of death shoot out and bring quick annihilation to any vehicle in their path. The sound effect for this is also very cool. One visual effect I really like is when you blow up an opponent's vehicle in front of you, the resulting firestorm obstructs your view of the racetrack just like it would if this were a real event. You have to drive through it to see clearly again, which adds a touch of realism to the action. Even the burnt carcass of the car you destroyed retains its mass and hit detection, so if you hit it, it will slow you down or knock you off course. I once went sailing off a jump, collided in the air with the remains of a car I had just blown up, and ended up nose-down in the corner of the swimming pool I was trying to jump over. That unfortunate event cost me several seconds to recover from. It sucks, but it makes the combat more visceral and real.

Jak X contains a great musical soundtrack. There's only one tune that I know for sure is licensed, a song by Queens of the Stoneage that is used in the intro--which, by the way, is one of the most amazing opening movie sequences I have ever seen in a video game. Talk about setting the mood for the game: this opening movie gets you pumped up big time to hop into the action. It's too bad the gameplay itself doesn't come close to matching the rockin', high speed intensity of the intro. But back to the music. Heavily laden with punchy rock guitar rifts, it suits the action perfectly. No rap, no eurotrash, no insanity-inducing Japanese pop, no grunge--what more could you ask for. I gotta give Naughty Dog props for knowing the only kind of music that goes with racing games: rock, or alternative rock, whatever you want to call it. I loved the song used in the intro so much I'm going to go out and buy the cd.

In other audio areas, the voice acting, as expected, is top notch. A surprising character steals the show this time around: Razer, the pompous, strangely dressed top dog in the Kras City racing circuit. His performance is excellent and his strange, where-the-hell-are-you-from accent really helps set the stage for the alien circumstances Jak and company find themselves in.

All in all, Jak X isn't a bad game, it just could have been so much better. The game's faults are bearable the first time through, but in Hero Mode (the more difficult replay mode) the problems really boil to the surface. The unbalanced weapon dynamic and the fact that supreme racing skill doesn't win races both become serious problems. You eventually reach a point in Hero Mode, roughly halfway through the game, when winning Circuit Races becomes impossible. You'll be cussing up a storm and wanting to throw your controller through the screen. It's really too bad, because this game had so much potential. If Naughty Dog could have taken a full two years on this game, man how cool it would have been.

Here's the final stats:

Graphics: 9 Very pleasing to the eye, although weapon effects are lame and
the drivers are absent from crash animations. Track designs are very good.

Audio: 8 The sound track is great and the sound effects for weapons, turbo, and crashing are nice, but your car's engine is a barely perceptible purr amid the chaos.

Gameplay: 6 It's just not that great. The weapons are almost useless, skillful racing does nothing for you, and some of the tracks were designed by a complete idiot with the pure intent of making you crash.

Control: Highly dependent on the situation. If you've got just the right car/tire/track combination, the control can be pretty good and powersliding and turboing feel great. If one of the three parts of that equation are wrong, forget about controlling your car. Just hit the turbo, slam into walls and make yourself blow up for fun. You'll still get some cash (orbs) at the end of the "race."

Difficulty: Average the first time through; Very High on Hero Mode, where all the games problems come to a head.

Replayability: Negligible. Hero Mode offers a more challenging version of the game, but why you would do that to yourself I have no idea. The game packs quite a few unlockables, but most are pretty stupid and you have to spend countless hours in Exhibition Mode earning enough orbs to unlock them all.

Final Score: I really wanted to give the game a 6.5, but Gamefaqs doesn't allow fractions. So I had to put my true score here.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 11/29/05