Daxter

This seems like an incredible waste of potential— at first. That's how I was prepared to frame this in the first couple hours I was playing it. Think about it: throughout the Jak trilogy, Daxter is shown as being this twitchy, highly mobile little guy, and by II is prominently swinging from gutters and rooftops and scurrying through pipes. Seems like he's gotten to know the city by heart in two years. Mobility always played a big part in the trilogy, so Daxter should take it up a notch, right? Wouldn't it be a slam dunk to pitch a spinoff as him like some kind of parkour sewer rat, slipping through pipes and machinery and jumping across roofs, scrounging up info on Jak's whereabouts in the filthy slums? Doesn't it seem really odd, then, that the character who you'd think should have even more mobility than Jak should be the one to be given the slower, methodical puzzle platformer that plays more like Ratchet & Clank?

It's jarring. Coming straight in from the trilogy, I had this expectation that Daxter would be able to roll, spin, and dive much the same way that Jak could— but when you're dropped into the game, you have no weapons, you can't attack, and you can't even run. The game directs you to a mission objective to start, and you're strongly advised not to turn around and explore first. If you do, you'll find that nothing is breakable without weapons, you can't drive the hovercars so far above you, most of the city is walled off— and worst of all, you feel like you're constantly on a short leash with how absolutely slow Daxter moves on foot. It gives you a bad feeling about exactly how directed the rest of the game will be, how much handholding it will do and how little faith it will have in you.

But, miraculously, as you keep playing, the game lets go of your hand, its strengths in being a puzzle platformer begin to shine through, and after a while it truly gets fun, in spite of the first impression. The setpieces go through the same kind of variety the trilogy showed— where Ready at Dawn best replicates Naughty Dog's creative touch —and once the game wraps up the mandatory tutorial level (which holds your hand so firmly that you need to be explained in help boxes what a health pack is), many of the puzzles begin to feel unique and truly clever. There are a few you'll encounter that are solved solely by reading the environment, then interacting with an object to influence another and allow you to pass— all without a single written hint. Most are reminiscent of Ratchet & Clank— turning screws, jumping chasms, moving big blocks, draining pools —but one in the fish cannery level was was like something out of Half-Life. Even the less outstanding puzzles are consistently engaging in some way.

The way the spray gun doubles as both a weapon and a platforming tool is pretty well done. It gets modifications in much the same way that the blaster does in Jak II and 3, and these modify both its combat and platforming capabilities. It's quite effective in the former, but a little underwhelming in the latter: the only new functions you get out of them is a higher jump. Not bad, but it felt like more could have been done with it. Jumping is also the one thing you can do. No speed boosting, or spinning a platform with it, or something.

Now, these absolutely are strengths, but I found that they're mostly confined to the storyline missions. The game unfortunately does not open up very much beyond this. The elephant in the room here is the city streets, which feel truly dead in all respects. Most of what gave Haven City some atmosphere in Jak II and 3 is absent. There's no civilians or Krimzon Guards walking around, for one, but there's also no Praxis announcements playing, the background music is sparse, there's jarringly little ambient noise in general, and the collectables the game does leave to keep you entertained out there are few and far-between— even after you're given the scooter (which you'll be tethered to off-mission for the rest of the game). There's basically nothing except Precursor Orbs, many of which can be picked up by doing a long spray gun-flying section. But these leave you an equally long way from your scooter by the end of it, and having to double back at Daxter's snail pace is nearly a disincentive from bothering with them at all. (And that's not even getting into their hitbox, which is small and off-center towards the bottom edge— so you can frequently screw yourself by flying straight though the center of an Orb but not picking it up.) Even when nearly all of the city is inaccessible to Daxter, it still feels like it's way too big and clearly designed for Jak.

The dream levels have a practical function in that they give you new abilities when they're completed. They're like the hobo in Bully that you give transistors to, except instead of somebody showing you new fight moves, Daxter straight-up has new moves be revealed to him in his dreams. They're all designed around movie references that were in vogue for 2006, and they're cute enough— but they're all built around minor variations of the same QTE formula and they overstay their welcome very quickly. I don't think the trophies serve any purpose except 100% completion, so I stopped bothering with them after a while.

The sections where you're going down a slide or a rope are not great. The hit detection is just plain bad, the timing is not very forgiving, it sometimes registers an input to move to another rope as just jumping straight down, and you don't even always grab on to the rope to begin the sequence. You're always glad when they're over.

The combat is punchy enough: it frequently presents you with multiple angles of attack, and more so as you get additional moves and weapon mods. It packs maybe the most 'oomph' when you're able to get Daxter to chain his axe swing move repeatedly and finish off one bug after another. The hit detection is not that great, though— the gun has a much shorter range than the effects suggest —and melee combat starts to get just a little bit repetitious after a while.

And lastly, the story. It's really not much to write about. It's the weakest link even more than Jak II's story was. Sort of like Rogue One, it being a prequel, you already know, more or less, how the story is going to end if you've seen the source material. Daxter gets a job as an exterminator, and then he breaks Jak out of prison. It may sound like I'm truncating a lot, but there's really not much else here. And while Jak II's writing was juvenile and full of constant tonal whiplash, that chaos was actually where I felt like the game got a lot of its intrigue. This is where the series seems to have matured and become more emotionally stable, but while it's not terribly angsty now, it's not terribly funny, either. None of the characters are particularly interesting or lively except for Osmo's surfer bro son, Ximon. I was left a little disappointed that Ximon didn't actually do much of anything reminiscent of surfing— he acted more like a tinkerer and mechanic, really, like a male equivalent of Keira. It's all a bit of a disappointment, but thankfully it doesn't bring the gameplay down with it.

All in all, though, this exceeded my expectations, and was much more fun than I remembered it being when I last tried playing through it over a decade ago. Games like these, made by some little outsourced studio, may always be doomed to live in the shadow of the games they're spun off from, but Daxter might actually be one that stands up by itself. It's not a great game, but it's quite good— much better than Jak X, in my opinion —and well worth playing if you want a good supplement to the mainline trilogy. Just don't expect something that plays like it. If you don't, you're bound to enjoy it even more.

I never played any of the jak and Daxter games, mainly because I didn't have a ps2 growing up instead having an Xbox. That said, I did have a psp which means I was able to Check out Daxter’s solo game which I found to be a ton of fun.

I'm not sure how this story fits into the main franchise (I'm guessing it's a midquel sue to the plot involving salter breaking jak out of prison) however I thoroughly enjoyed the story as it takes Daxter who starts off as a cowardly sidekick to a more stoic hero and develops him into a hero in his own right as he not only saves his more powerful ally, but also the people who help him out along the way as they all appear to be victims of an oppressive regime that only he can put a stop to (again, I don't know how this plays out in the main series.) Humoursly, this involves him getting a job as a bug exterminator, which somehow leads him to his goal of rescue in jak in a way I won't spoil here. Suffice to say, it's a platformer where our hero faces against robotic insects roughly his size that takes advantage of his tiny stature by having him crawl under human sized furniture and using his fumigator in creative ways to explore these environments. As this is a PlayStation platformer, we of course have collectibles which serve as unlockable for both necessary upgrades to our arsenal and side content to keep the gameplay fresh and innovating. There's also a largely optional mechanic of Daxter having dream sequences of him rein acting pop culture moments like he's gex the gecko for further rewards. I say mostly optional as the first of these is required to complete in order to progress through the story. Another gameplay element is his ability to operate vehicles, this mostly to help him get around the vast environments, however there's certain stages where he needs to complete tasks of these contraptions which also break up the gameplay from becoming monotonous.

I don't know how this stacks against the main series, however I thoroughly enjoyed myself playing this as I'm sure anyone looming to check this out.