#50 - Jak and Daxter: The Lost Frontier

It’s been a while since I did a rage review on a game, mostly because of the time investment. Before I’ve gotten around it by watching the plot on the laptop and doing the rest from memory but I assure you I have played this game recently. The sacrifices I make for you…

So, the big 3 star-duos of the Playstation 2 era are Ratchet and Clank, Jak and Daxter and Sly and Bentley, but the only one of the 3 to find much success in the post-PS2 era was Ratchet and Clank. Sly and Bentley did have a PS3 release in Thieves in time but that’s outside of HD remasters, it’s the only PS3 title with just them, with Jak and Daxter, their only PS3 release they star in outside of HD remasters is

  

Oh, my first nemesis. It sucked. Also, they were in that brawl game Battle Royale, doesn’t really count though.

But there was always the PSP, Sony’s handheld console, Jak and Daxter found success with the Daxter title, which is a solid game but then we have the dark sheep of the Jak and Daxter series. This is Jak and Daxter: The Lost Frontier

Released to surprising critical acclaim, this was the product of High Impact Games, the guys who made Ratchet and Clank: Size Matters and Secret Agent Clank, so good hands! This was their last big-name title before they fell and decided to only make garbage and mobile games.

Yeah, sure that one was a hit…

Naughty Dog, the original Jak and Daxter team had a few plot ideas from drafts they were doing for Jak IV, but with the PS3 on the horizon and a team working on Uncharted it was decided to ditch it and work on a racing game instead, Jak X: Combat Racing, a surprisingly solid racing game that’s getting a PS4 remaster. So, let’s see how High Impact destroyed it as we take a look.

Story

We open with Jak, now played by Josh Keaton, possibly the worst possible choice of replacement for Mike Erwin (Josh Keaton is a good actor but his goody-good approach to Jak doesn’t work, he sounds NOTHING like Mike Erwin.) They’re searching for a new source of Eco, since it’s running out. Thing is, there’s no evidence it’s affected anything, except for Jak being unable to transform into his light or Dark Forms. He’s out with… Kiera, I guess, except she doesn’t look very good and has a lazy eye.

They’re attacked by Sky Pirates and I already don’t care. Ratchet and Clank already did this, and they actually made it funny, also they were side villains in the main game. Their engines are shot and they need to land but they’ve “run out world” no. Bullsh*t! After finding Green Eco to repair the ship, thought there was a shortage of Eco... They run into the company of Duke Skyheed, played by Phil LaMarr, the actor who played Sig in the original. Sig is awesome but put away those happy faces, he’s not in the game. Even though it would be SO DAMN EASY!

Anyway, he has an eco-seeker device that doesn’t work but Kiera manages to get some life into it, they promise to let them have it if they can prove it can be protected. That’s not a bad excuse for a gun course. Anyway, on their return Daxter falls down somewhere and gets covered in Dark Eco, this causes him to become an 8-ft monster. For those unfamiliar with the games, I’m about to go full fanboy, sorry about that. Anyway…

WWWWWHHHHHHHHHHHAAAAAAAAAAAAAATTTTTTTTT!!!!!!!

OK, first of all, Dark Eco is what turned Daxter into an Ottsel in the first place. Ottsels are Precursors, and their exposure to Dark Eco turned Precursors into Dark Makers, ergo Daxter should now be a Dark Maker. Second off, if Jak can’t transform to Dark Jak because of the eco inbalance or something why can Daxter turn into *sigh* Dark Daxter, and yes he can do it at will, we see him do so later on. Finally, WHO THE F*CK THOUGHT THIS WAS A GOOD IDEA!

So after… that, Kiera gets abducted by Phoenix, the leader of the Sky Pirates and Jak heads after them, after a chase they get shot down, again, and have to find a way to get the ship fixed, they fight their way through giant robots and find a guy who can’t remember his name, his name’s Tim. So, Tim is an engineer who designed these robots but he can’t really remember why. He fixes Jak’s ship and stows away as they fight their way onto the pirate ship.

In the fight, the eco-seeker is lost, Kiera, for some reason, demands a truce between Jak and Phoenix so they can find it again. Jak eventually recovers the device but it needs power from Light Eco, there’s an Aeropan research station they can find some. Wait, Aeropans, WHAT? Haven City was supposed to be the one safe place from metal-heads in Jak II, they added Spargus City in the third game, and I was fine with it, Kras City was pushing it in Jak X but Aeropa now exists as well?

Anyway, before they can do that, they need supplies from a place called Far Drop. It’s under attack by Dark Mutants, we’ll get to these later. Jak helps a guy called Barter save his stores so he can continue to sell his wares, in exchange for supplies. He does so and they head to the rig, as the device needs some power. As they explore the rig, Jak finds a chair for similar experiments he was subjected to in Jak II, someone’s experimenting with Dark Eco, for some reason. After retrieving the light eco, Daxter stops at something that clearly isn’t a candy machine, thinking it’s a candy machine, it’s a lazy segway into another Dark Daxter segment. It does bring up that the cells in the station were designed to detain dark mutants, possibly.

Daxter tries to bring this up with Jak but he’s too busy eyeballing a new ship. Best friends right there! The eco-seeker is missing 3 parts, but its arrow is pointing towards 2 of them, a point near Far Drop and a point at the Aeropan Barracks. They head to either of these locations and get their part, at Far Drop Barter asks him to fight another pirate. At the Aeropan barracks, Tim begins to remember his time as a Dark Eco Sage, and was responsible for building the Dark Eco warriors which how are they transforming when Jak can’t?! When he realised what he was doing he tried to build robots to stop them.

We also find out Phoenix was an Aeropan Air Force Commander, they were in the middle of a war they were losing, which is why this began. When he found out about the experiments he put an end to them by abducting Tim, the chief scientist of the project, Tim was injured in the escape and lost his memory. Phoenix became an outlaw as that’s how the Aeropans saw him anyway. Apparently Skyheed has now spread the Dark Power through all his citizens. How he did that without an eco-sage, no idea, but Skyheed, that’s a massive fail I think, also how does Skyheed know this? When they leave, a defence-system activates leading to a Daxter having to disarm some missiles. You know if you’ve played the game in Hero mode why I say f*ck this mission!

With those two parts, the seeker points towards its final component, in a ship graveyard over the brink. They successfully gather the part but are soon attacked by the Behemoth, the Aeropan ship, they manage to disable its heavy weapons before attacking the ship directly using the main pirate ship, The Phantom Blade. Now completed, the seeker points back to the Aeropan research rig, which they now believe was built atop a Precursor facility, they were right and discover an offline eco core, a prism in the centre out of alignment, Kiera manages to fix it but as she starts to bring it online, Cutter, a character so essential this is the first time I’ve brought him up arrives with Skyheed, who they’ve double-crossed him to. Also, Cutter is voiced by the same guy who voiced Kliever, Brian Bloom. Kliever is awesome, this guy is about is interesting as dirt. They manage to escape by raising the eco-core but Skyheed promises to follow them.

They soon receive word that Skyheed is laying siege to Far Drop, Jak wonders how they found it. Gee I wonder, could it be the pirate traitor revealed in the last f*cking cutscene? Jak

Anyway, they head there and fight off the Dark Mutants, thanks in part to a plan by Barter. But the Behmoth is on course and they have to fight it again. They get another message telling them they can use the warp gate at the Aeropan barracks to gain access into Aeropan village undetected, even giving them a code to do so. At the barracks Jak finally sees Daxter transform and his reaction is… why the f*ck are you joking about this sh*t?! Anyway, so after Daxter devours some mutants, he transforms back and heads through with the others. Turns out that Ruskin, Skyheed’s right hand and a character so essential this is the first time I’ve mentioned him, is the traitor, as he thinks things have gotten out of hand.

Skyheed kills him and we’re treated to fighting, and dog-fighting, and more dog-fighting. Phoenix sacrifices himself and presumably all his remaining crew to down the Behomth’s shields, Kiera arrives with Tim and an upgraded ship to allow them to destroy the Behemoth, restoring the eco core and putting the world back in balance. Kiera channels eco for the first time, hinting that she may be an Eco Sage or something (no mention of her father and him being one in the entire game btw) and there’s something over the brink for the crew to explore in the grand days of NEVER!

This games story is odd, why they chose to abandon everything that made Jak II and 3 so interesting is baffling and what they chose to replace it with is even more baffling. But what makes me truly hate this story is how they handle the leads. Daxter is fine, about the same as normal but Jak, him not reacting at all to Dark Daxter is a betrayal of his character to a degree I will not forgive. And his goody-good attitude doesn’t mix well with the tortured soul from the previous games. I guess it’d be fine to newcomers if he didn’t react angrily to the chair earlier in the game.

Beyond that, going from mystics and Dark makers and precursors and save the world to Sky pirates and City is kind of boring. The stakes feel lower, there aren’t as many characters we care about, I’m in no way invested in whatever romantic subplot they want between Kiera and Pheonix and the threat itself just isn’t that interesting. Dark Daxter is its own can of worms, and it doesn’t get better.

Design

The design of this game is bland. Jak and Daxter’s big thing is semi-open worlds with minimal loading times, now this wouldn’t really be possible given the PSP’s tiny hardware (although Daxter pulled off a smaller open hub-world) but the vast majority of the game is linear, with the only exploration available being in the sky. Beyond that though, the colours used don’t stand out as nicely as they should, the designs are ugly, the design of the enemy robots feel ripped off from either the Eudora level from Ratchet and Clank or from KG Blast bots. As for the Dark Mutants, got absolutely nothing to say about them. Some of the ship parts look OK, but, like the vast majority of the game, it feels empty and that doesn’t bode well for the gameplay. Speaking of…

Gameplay

OK, let’s get to the real meat of game, its gameplay. And I can say there are 3 distinct styles with the occasional mini-game or something added for extra variety. Let’s start with Dark Daxter, it’s a side-scrolling brawler with puzzles. These are boring, tedious and a waste of even the meagre bit of potential Dark Daxter had, the puzzles are easy and the enemies aren’t threatening, it’s just bad.

Secondly, we have the mostly traditional Jak gameplay, a mixture of platforming and shooting. Because the camera’s mapped to the shoulder buttons now, the camera is awkward to control and you miss the dodge rolls to make combat easier, and some of the moves just look weird in this game. As explained in the story, you no longer have Dark or Light Jak but instead you get eco abilities granted at various points in the game, some of them give you high powered attacks but often they help in various platforming segments. These are enjoyable enough but nothing especially difficult comes from any of the platforming. You get 4 guns, the same as in Jak II, and none of the guns level up in the way they did in Jak II and 3, you also don’t get the Peace Maker instead getting a gun called the Lobber which shoots green grenades, yay? Combat relies on a mixture of eco attacks and gunplay but the aiming of the weapons isn’t as tight as in previous games, combined with the camera issues can make combat a frustrating experience.

The gameplay is also not designed for physical encounters like the two at Barter’s bar, these should’ve been cut. The game is mostly linear for these sections, with only a few fetch-quest side missions that are locked after you leave the Behemoth. You collect dark eco as you can go and you can trade that with Kiera for various upgrades, how is she not already a sage if she can do that? Also, aside from health upgrades, most of them aren’t very interesting.

Thirdly we have dog-fighting. There were only a couple of hellcat missions in Jak 3, there are a lot of them here, it takes up a considerable amount of the game and they control OK, I’ve heard people say these levels suck and it can be incredibly tedious to pilot a ship to a level when there’s nothing else to do. Whilst the second half is true, honestly the actual gameplay is OK, the ship controls well enough for it to be usable, the combat is serviceable if mostly without a lot of difficulty, there are the odd target race challenges which are also easy, the occasional destroy the Dark Eco Crystal missions and you have a choice of ships which you can modify using scrap from your enemies.

What I’m less fond of is the goddamn daxter-jacking segments. On a single ship you go through 3 QTEs within a time limit and it’s usually not that hard, on a missile where you have to go through 5 of those QTEs, then jump over a bunch of flaming hazards before doing another one all before time runs out, that’s hard, and in Hero Mode is f*cking annoying! Also, the chase sequences suck too, there’s no real sense of speed since are your ships are usually quite slow.

So, at best the gameplay is average, which is a shame since the Jak III usually had solid controls and gameplay, even if it splurged on variety a little too much.

But that combined with the fact this game’s story isn’t good, the characters feel out of character, the design is bland and much of the interesting bits are all thrown away, this only has one result

THIS GAME GIVES ME RAGE ISSUES!

Trust me when I say I’ve played worse games but few as disappointing as this. It’s a shame Jak never really recovered and Naughty Dog seem to have no real interest in doing another Jak game. This series has a ton of unused potential, it’s just a shame this game squanders it so.

Rage Rating 54%