The Good: Interesting story, great characters and voice acting, looks good
The Bad: Horrendous open city that is a chore to navigate, controls and mechanics are so poorly implemented and developed that the game is unwieldy, no checkpoints leads to most gamers never finishing the game, lack of lock-on makes shooting feel sloppy, many bugs and glitches, frame rate on Vita is unacceptably poor
This review has actually been a long time coming. I never really liked or got into Jak and Daxter. I gave Jak II a shot back when I was about 13 and for some reason liked it, but I also remember being extremely frustrated and hating it too. The game was a complete redesign of the series. Gone is the aimless platforming and collect-a-thon stuff. Here we have an open world GTA: Vice City clone with attitude. Jak II received a lot of criticism for steering away from the cheery tone of the first game. Jak now talks but has a bad attitude, he shoots guns, and the game has more spunk and adult content. It was a great step for the series but it created more problems than the first game had.
The first thing is the crappy open world. I can’t tell you how tedious and frustrating it is to move around in this damn city. It’s a maze for one with tight linear areas to move around and the vehicles control like complete garbage. You bump into everything as you’re driving around, and if the game itself isn’t hard enough I died multiple times just trying to get to a mission. I have never seen such a poorly built open city before, this takes the cake. If the vehicles aren’t enough the difficulty of the game is by far way up there with the hardest. I guarantee 95% of players will quite before they even get 5 missions in. You will die time and time again, but not only because it’s just hard. The game is just poorly designed.
Take into account no lock-on for aiming whatsoever. You’re left with the poor auto aim which doesn’t work half the time. Add on glitches, sloppy platforming, and a crappy hover board and you have a craptastic game. Now that’s not to say Jak II didn’t have potential. It has AAA budget written all over it. Excellent voice acting, great graphics, the works. It just seems the development team wasn’t up to speed on how smooth a game needs to play.
Even with the poor game play elements aside the game seems like it wasn’t play tested. Some areas are so difficult to get through, this usually includes the mass amounts of enemies you have to shoot, that you literally need to rely on luck that the AI will miss more than hit just so you can pass on. But the one ultimate reason that this game can not be forgiven are the lack of checkpoints. I don’t just mean there’s one or two poorly placed. I mean there are none; zero. You will get half way through a mission and die and restart over and over again at the beginning. This is just absurd and completely unfair. If the game had fair checkpoints I could overlook everything else, but that one major issue nearly ruins the game.
I also don’t like how long this game is. With the difficulty and poor mechanics in place you just want it to end. Be it the hair tearing racing missions, hover board missions, or the nearly unbeatable timed missions. I don’t think I can remember a game harder than maybe Demons’ Souls, but that game was at least understandable as to why it was hard. It was meant to be that way. Jak II is not.
I really wanted to love this game but I just can’t. Even with the somewhat interesting Saturday morning cartoon type story I just hated this game. I will never play it again and wouldn’t wish my worst enemy to sit through this. Jak II has a great AAA feel, but a low budget bargain bin gameplay aesthetic. The game also looks good on the Vita, but like Jak and Daxter, the frame rate drops to single digits quite often and chugs. Either the game is pushing the Vita too hard or it’s just poorly optimized. Even without that issue the game is just terrible.