Jak 2

Last time I had a look at the game Jak and Daxter: The precursor Legacy for the PS2 but today I’m going to take a look at Jak 2: Renegade, why they dropped Daxter from the title, I’ll never know as he’s still in the game, heck you even have a few tiny sections where you play as him, one of which running from a giant boulder and then a giant spider in a Crash Bandicoot style chase level, as well as a race and a game of whack a mole.

Jak 2 is set after the true ending of Jak and Daxter which involved all 100 power cells. Basically Jak, Daxter, Keira and Samos end up going through the portal and Jak gets arrested and locked in jail for 2 years before Daxter rescues him and when he does, Jak has gained new abilities from being experimented on with Dark Eco, turning into Dark Jak, a much more savage version of himself. 

Dark Jak can gain abilities through the game such as the Dark Blast, the Dark Bomb, Invincibility and even a giant form, but to be honest the last one isn’t really necessary or even that useful. Though to get all those you need yellow gems taken from killing metal heads, enemies that will appear all over the game which sounds simple but if you die, the metal head will reappear but won’t drop the gem if you picked it up before.

One major change to the first game is the inclusion of four weapons. Now while you can still use your old attacks from the first game, you will need to rely on weapons such as the Scatter gun which is a futuristic shotgun with a wide close range attack but sucks at long range, a blaster which is good for single long range attacks, the Vulcan Fury, a laser minigun and eventually the Peacemaker which shoots a large ball of energy which destroys most enemies in one hit and can hit more than one enemy at a time, but it takes time to charge and has very low ammo.

Another inclusion is hover cars and hover bikes and a map and mission system based of GTA. That’s right it’s out of Mario’s shadow but sort of in GTA, but it does stand out from GTA as you don’t get hovering vehicles in GTA, not unless you cheat anyway and the guards are nothing like GTA cops, one wrong move and it’s like you have 5 stars.

Most of the game is centred around the area known as Haven City, it’s where you’ll spend most of your time and most of the missions are here including the stadium where you’ll have to race and win, three times as well as a race through the city. Other areas do exist outside the main city map, such as the precursor temple, the sewers, the prison, a strip mine and many more. 

So how would I describe the game’s difficulty, well Jak and Daxter is somewhat easy, you may well die a few times but you know it’s pretty easy, Jak 2 on the other hand, bloody hell, I got my ass kicked so hard I think I tasted ass cheek. The difficulty level for most of the game is insane. I mean the final boss is pretty hard, you expect that for a last boss unless your name is Wind Waker, but there are missions earlier that are FAR HARDER. For example take out 5 hellcats which are armoured and heavily armed flying tanks, soon as you fire one bullet the guards come after you like it’s 6 stars on GTA and your health bar has eight units which is higher than Jak and Daxter, BUT EVERY ENEMY DOES 2 DAMAGE!. Why even bother increasing the health if it’s gonna amount to the same, your car gets blown up after like a few hits and there’s another 2 units gone. The enemies are far from stupid and you go down so easily and there is no health packs anywhere inside the main city map and when you do find them in other areas, boy are they rare. Do you know what the other problem is, SOD ALL CHECKPOINTS. You can fight off hoards of enemies, past long dangerous puzzles and you die anywhere on a mission and it’s right back to the start, the original gave you a checkpoint like every few feet when you didn’t need them but when you need them here you don’t get them and this is normal mode, you can unlock something called Hard mode. How the hell can it be harder, do you just walk through a door and get the death star shoot you with it’s laser. Then again I'm pretty sure that it's easily remedied.

Hard mode is unlocked with so many precursor orbs which have gone from everywhere money to rare items which with enough unlock secrets the first being to toggle Jak’s goatee on or off, so if you don’t like it, it’s gone, but others can change his head size and even unlock cutscenes to watch again and scrap books of design art and even level select and invincibility but those take quite a lot of these orbs.

One last add on to look at is the Hoverboard, I’m sorry Jet board. It controls similar to games like Tony Hawk and can be used to grind rails that Jak would normally just fall off and make jumps, that on foot would be impossible and I think it’s a great item to have.

And I almost forgot Onin’s game, a mini game where you have to press the right buttons matching the symbols that fly onto the screen before they disappear, press the wrong button it classes as a miss, and you can only have 9 misses, one more and you fail. Getting the same symbol in a row increases the amount of points you win. One round must be played to advance the story but it’s easier than the other rounds so it’s alright.

So how would I describe this game, well the story is excellent, but the difficulty is so high many fans of the series skipped this game. The original review by those at Playstation Magazine described this game as hard but not brutal. Guys what were you smoking at the time, this game is so hard there are videos on youtube of people talking about the game’s hardest missions and bitching about it being too hard. But despite the brutal difficulty it’s still a brilliant game, probably avoid though if you aren’t a hardcore gamer as this game has made me rage quit more times than any other game ever has.

But what can I say but that I’ve beaten this game and to those who skipped this game, neh neh neh neh neh!

Okay, alright, though there is something I forgot to address in the Jak and Daxter review and that is what Jak and Daxter actually represent. 

Jak is the hero we effectively want to be, while Daxter on the other hand...

...is the hero that we're afraid that we might actually be if dropped into these situations, cowardly, sarcastic and with more bark than bite. Hey I'll admit in that situation I'm more likely to be the idiot who slips into a pool of dark eco than the guy who saves the day each time, just saying. Anyways, Next Time, Jak 3.