Jak X: Combat Racing
The combat's there, but not so much the racing.
Published: October 24, 2005
The game does deliver on one thing quite nicely, though, and that's an unflinching sense of speed. Hitting your turbo rewards you with a Burnout-like blurring of the edges of the screen, and the streaming approach to loading levels means there's quite a bit more detail and expansiveness to the environment. It also means blindingly fast load times, usually no more than a second or three, which is great.
Still with all the speed and the length of the levels, there's an obvious lack of the same kind of luck detail that made the platforming games so fun. They still pop with that unmistakable style, and when you flying by at 100 miles an hour, it's not like you're paying much attention to the purdy trees, but there is a sense that the engine sacrificed some little touches for that speed.
There are little touches, though, like the little fireworks popping over Kras City on the track selection menus that you'd probably miss, and of course the animation during the cutscenes, but even these don't seem to have the same quality as in past games. There's less twiddling fingers and nuanced movements tossed in just for kicks, so while the scenes are still miles ahead of nearly all the other cutscenes in any genre, they just don't quite have that Jak sparkle.
There is quite a bit of oomph in the audio department, though. The voice acting is, of course perfect (even if the actual dialogue this time around is pretty trite), but even the effects and separation in sound channels via the dinky Dolby Pro-Logic II sounds good. The soundtrack is entirely made up of a sort of agro-rock that's actually rather pleasant, and the instrumental tracks donated by Queens of the Stone Age fit perfectly.
This is the first THX certified game I've seen in a while, and though I do wonder what exactly specifications for movie theatres are doing in a game (I guess stuff like crossover and output quality are nice, but most gamers don't have systems where that's going to be noticeable, much less care about it).
So it's a big, fast, pleasant-sounding game when it's not interrupted by crashes every two seconds (I literally crashed and respawned right into a wall or was instantly taken out three times in a row on a couple of occasions) and expletives screamed at the TV. The fact that in such a short time what seemed to be an extremely competent racer fell well below expectations is a crying shame.
This is not a proper Jak game, and that's not even including the whole tacked-on XTREEEEEEM angle to the game. I couldn't believe I actually heard the only two female characters in the game say "girl power" as a taunt, but it's nowhere near as bad as the "you just got Jaked" (huurrrr, get it, guyz, his name's Jak and you got jacked!!!) bits.
Too much of the game felt like it was trying too hard while not relying on legitimate challenge in the non-racing stuff (I don't think I had to retry a single Freeze Rally to get gold), and the storyline past the intro and up until the end had no real substance to it. It might have Jak in the title, but this isn't what I was hoping for in the fourth entry to the franchise.
