Jak X: Combat Racing

Warning: Contains Spoilers!

Jak X begins with Daxter in a bar talking about crap that he says he’s done which was really done by Jak. Jak crashes his car into the bar to rescue Daxter as hoodlums in the bar try to kill him and they drive off to the reading of the will of Krew, the morbidally obese man from Jak2, you know the guy who clones himself in his boss fight and ends up blown up at the end.

Anyway we’re introduced to Krew’s daughter, Rayn who is in fact nothing like her father and after they drink to Krew’s memory they all find out they’ve been poisoned by a hologram of Krew.

But of course this opens up the ‘story’ mode, I say story as it’s really just a series of races with some cutscenes appearing now and then. What really bothers me is in one clip they find out what the poison was, um let’s see why don’t you run from this deal, you know the poison, you can easily find out what the antidote is, just run to a doctor. There’s no reasoning for it, it’s not like it’s said that the antidote would take to long to make themselves, so it’s just bull.

Basically ‘story’ mode is broken up into four cups, the originally named red, green, blue and yellow, gee that was so difficult. Yeah I know those are the colours of the 4 original types of Eco, but it’s still lazy. The cups consist of several random races which give you points, when you have enough you can enter a qualifier, win 2 of these and you get the grand prix which consists of three races, rinse repeat, turn up the difficulty. It’s a racing game people, what are expecting an epic. The only thing epic about racing is how epically long Michael Schumacher’s win streak was.

The gameplay mechanics are like Wipeout crossed with Mario Kart, your cars can pick up awesomely powerful weapons like in Wipeout, far more devastating and realisitic than Mario, but you still come back 5 seconds later, which is where my annoyance with this game begins, if you die, you reappear after 5 seconds which isn’t the part I have a problem with, what is, is that if the computer dies and trust me I counted this, they reappear after just 2 SECONDS!, They can reappear, die and then reappear again in the time it takes for you to reappear, 2 SECONDS!

  

The weapon system is virtually the same as Wipeout. Yellow pickups give you offensive weapons such as the vulcan fury, i.e. machine guns, grenade launcher, missiles, peace maker which seeks out the leader, hello mario kart’s blue shell and of course the super nova which takes out ALL cars in front of you, so if you’re last everybody dies! Red pickups give you defensive weapons such as land mines, gun towers, smoke screen, oil slicks, blind drone which flies backwards down the track crashing into other racers, the shield, turbo assist which refills your boost bar and stops all the other racers and the attack drone which flies around the player shooting at enemies. These weapons can be upgraded when the dark eco bar is filled which grows when you take damage and more importantly when you take out another player. These upgrades can do things like burning oil slicks, increasing the amount of ammo a weapon has or even just increasing the amount of damage you inflict. The other eco pickups on the track include green which restores your car’s health and blue which gives you sweet sweet acceleration, you know speed boosts.

In races you start off without weapons, but in modes like death match you start off with a low firepower version of the vulcan fury which has infinite ammo. That’s right there are other modes, such as capture the flag, grab the items and whoever has the most wins, death race, where you drive around shooting drone cars, deathmatch, team deathmatch and hunting down monsters with your cars and who kills the most wins. These little extra modes are the most fun part of the game, hell there’s even one where you drive into on coming traffic and crash into as many cars as you can. Another mode is picking up power cells, yes the things you spend all of Jak1 looking for and race around charging up with your car’s boost and it explodes and you charge another, who charges the most wins.

You can select different characters for your car in multiplayer mode, not that it makes much of a difference, you can’t see the driver, you can only hear them. Let’s face it the only character that does make a real difference is Jak who is playable in story and that’s cause Daxter is holding onto the back of the car. You can download other characters by having a copy of Daxter on PSP or a save file from the games, Jak and Daxter, Jak 2, Jak 3 and Ratchet Gladiator. Again you can’t see the driver so it makes no difference!

Cars can be upgraded via tune ups and adding new parts by spending your winnings from the races, boy that was a shocker. The money used is the precursor orbs, wait a minute didn’t Jak 2 say these things had become rare and that’s why there was only a hundred odd on the game, I know I’m picking at unnecessary threads here but come on. The game’s music is pretty awesome with it’s main theme, “You Think I Ain’t Worth a Dollar But I Feel Like a Millionaire” by Queens of the Stone age as well as their other song on the game “A Song for the Dead”. The other music on the game is pretty awesome as well.

Next time: Daxter for PSP.