On a dare, and because I need to make up for missed posts, I'm going to review Jak II here.

So, this game is a sequel to the original Jak and Daxter.

I liked Jak and Daxter, it was fun, shiny, and all-in-all, really colorful. I felt it was well done, and the story was amusing, if not really ground- breaking.

The sequel boasts better graphics, they claim. Well, I don't know about that, it's limited to the PS2s hardware, which the original game was already pushing the limits of. To be fair, you usually don't notice the loading sequences when you wander through the city (which is huge), except when you walk through a gate. Then it doesn't say loading, but you have to watch the door unlocking sequence, which gives the game enough time to load.

That's cool.

The story is a bit different. Well, a lot different. The entire game plays like a fanfic someone wrote based off of the original story, with additional characters, and a hell of a lot more angst. Also, Jak talks. That's kind of cool, but they gave him enough of a personality transplant from what I've seen that he ... actually, he had no real personality in the original game except to roll his eyes at Daxter a lot. I'll consider that an improvement.

The new world that Jak and Daxter run around in is different, so instead of getting powerups in the form of eco, you now get guns. This is kind of interesting. Jak also has some mysterious and uncontrollable power to turn into a monstrous version of himself that can't use guns, but is pretty darn fast, has claws, and can learn some interesting new abilities. Like doing a ground-pound and creating an area of effect attack that wipes out pretty much any enemy nearby. The rarity of actually being able to transform against the use of doing so is something that could probably stand to be adjusted. Really, most enemies are so simple that it's faster just to use a gun to skip the transformation sequence.

Anyway. The majority of the game actually takes place in a single very large and ugly city. Jak doesn't run very quickly, either. Fortunately, you can steal other people's hover-cars or hover-bikes, kind of like GTA to get around. But they all handle like cows on skates, blow up really easily, and the city is full of inconveniently places obstacles and slower traffic. The city is, without a doubt, the worst part of the game. For one thing, it's the hub you must navigate to get from one mission to another, and some missions even take place inside the city. For another, the system chunks so badly when you do almost anything in the city that you can actually see the scan-lines cross the screen as the hardware tries to keep up with the game.

The city also hosts dozens of mini-missions, little terminals that you walk up to and get assigned some task, usually involving getting to a specific point within the time limit. This is remarkably unhelpful because for many of these, it shows you a precursor orb in some part of the city without telling you where it is, then returns you to your own viewpoint with a twenty second timer counting down. You chances of getting to the orb before you run out of time is pretty much all based on luck. The hover-cycles are the fastest vehicles in the game, and, well, you need them to get to these goals in time. But you can't check the terminal from a hover-cycle. If you bring one to the terminal and hop off the cycle to check it, your cycle will usually be gone when the camera comes back to you. So you're dependant on some passer-by to be riding a hovercycle that you can steal, which takes a few seconds of your preciously counting down time.

I'm certain that it's possible; the game never would have been released were it not. But the difficulty, and the dependance on luck involved in getting these....

Well, that's only bonus objectives, which as far as I can tell, are only actually needed if you like to get 100% completion on your games. Which I do.

But we'll worry less about that, and more about how the actual missions play. Less time-limits, but if you blow your mission (die) you typically get reset back to the very begining of the mission. Check-points are exceedingly rare.

...yeah.

The game had a lot of potential, but for one thing, I can't stand the city, and for another, it seems to me that this game is asking a lot of dedication for a 100% completion, and it looks like an investment of time that will be largely frustrating. The difficulty pretty much guarantees that the payoff will not be worth the reward.

Final analysis: I'm going to try and take this game back to the store to trade it in for store credit today.