Paradise Lost
Jak and Daxter: The Lost Frontier continues the mascot duo's adventure, but leaves us wondering if they should have just stayed put.
Published: December 1, 2009
It's never easy translating a PS2 experience to the PSP, but developer High Impact Studios, founded by ex-Insomniac staffers, have clearly demonstrated that with the right approach they can pull it off. They've clearly got the technical know-how, and their debut effort, Ratchet & Clank: Size Matters proved it. Follow-up efforts, however, haven't been so strong. Secret Agent Clank, despite featuring the superior of the series' two mainstays, faltered and never quite captured the charm and more importantly fun of the main series or indeed Size Matters' homerun success.
Jak and Daxter: The Lost Frontier, unfortunately, continues that apparent inability to really encapsulate the sort of intangible attraction that made Naughty Dog and Insomniac's work on the PlayStation 2 rise above other mascot-driven platformer fodder. It has some serious technical wow moments to be sure, but for every pedestrian-littered city or well-animated cutscene, there's a boring air combat sequence or by-the-numbers exploration puzzle. Most egregious of all is the fact that the platforming -- the absolute core of the series -- feels at turns incredibly frustrating and listlessly boring. There's just no magic here, despite some interesting characters and classic Daxter-driven hilarity.
It kills me to write it, but this just doesn't feel like a proper Jak game, and much of that comes down to the way the camera is handled, which drains the life out of combat and leads to clunky traversal. There's a strange feeling of it all just laying there without having any real oomph or passion; Jak's jumps feel flat and weightless, trying to use a weapon is an exercise in errant shots thanks to a lack of a strafe lock (which, it should be pointed out Size Matters had and desperately needed) and it all just feels... weak. It's like the Jak formula passed through a series of Xerox copies; sure all the individual components are there and you can make out where the original source was, but all the nuance has been worn down, blasted out by too much or too little contrast.
The resulting game just has none of the verve or passion that made the Jak and Daxter games so damned endearing. Even while I was cursing the idea of trying to get through a free-roaming GTA-lite city or getting hung up on stupid difficulty spikes in Jak II -- until now the series' low point -- I still kept coming back for more. With Lost Frontier I felt absolutely none of that drive at any point; I simply kept playing because I had to for the review.
The biggest source of frustration definitely lies in the use of weapons. Jak's gunstaff can morph into a handful of different options from shotgun to laser-precise beam, but to get the full benefit of the auto-lock, the camera has to be pointed at the targets, and using the shoulder buttons to lazily swing things around takes time. Even still, it's a crapshoot as to whether or not you'll be pointing at the thing you actually want to hit. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the early training run you have to make through an obstacle course where you're instructed not to hit innocents, but the auto-targeting locks onto them anyway. It's a hilariously busted system that could have been fixed by just letting the player hold both shoulder buttons and center on a target to strafe.
The camera often presents a weird viewpoint when performing platforming manuvers too; with no way to control any up/down movement, the default position is often such that it's not quite clear if you're close enough to the edge of a platform to make it. You fall, you die, and the game's... interesting checkpoints (which varies from frustratingly sparse when you need them most to over-diligent when you're just trying to get through an area while backtracking or lost) force you to give it another go. I ended up double-jump-spinning on every jump just to hope I had enough distance. Things like angling the camera in fixed positions during the bar swinging segments left me without the best view to see the next jump or leap down to a safe resting area. The camera is a massive pain in the ass more than it's helpful, and it kills the sense of running and jumping, absolute tenets of the Jak and Daxter experience.
Then there are the Dark Daxter bits. See, Jak's not the only one that can go all mean and angry; Dax ends up getting a Dark Eco bath and turns into a broken English-spouting brute that just spins his way through, well, everything. Poorly. His tornado attack (along with a ground smash, grab and projectile throws) lets him blaze through side-scrolling or isometric-angle crawls through caves and sewers and simply feel like a button mash as you move from left to right, stopping only to grab a spider and throw it at a hole so you can proceed. These segments only crop up a few times, but when they do, they're an eye-rolling exercise in tedium.
Jak and Daxter: The Lost Frontier, unfortunately, continues that apparent inability to really encapsulate the sort of intangible attraction that made Naughty Dog and Insomniac's work on the PlayStation 2 rise above other mascot-driven platformer fodder. It has some serious technical wow moments to be sure, but for every pedestrian-littered city or well-animated cutscene, there's a boring air combat sequence or by-the-numbers exploration puzzle. Most egregious of all is the fact that the platforming -- the absolute core of the series -- feels at turns incredibly frustrating and listlessly boring. There's just no magic here, despite some interesting characters and classic Daxter-driven hilarity.
It kills me to write it, but this just doesn't feel like a proper Jak game, and much of that comes down to the way the camera is handled, which drains the life out of combat and leads to clunky traversal. There's a strange feeling of it all just laying there without having any real oomph or passion; Jak's jumps feel flat and weightless, trying to use a weapon is an exercise in errant shots thanks to a lack of a strafe lock (which, it should be pointed out Size Matters had and desperately needed) and it all just feels... weak. It's like the Jak formula passed through a series of Xerox copies; sure all the individual components are there and you can make out where the original source was, but all the nuance has been worn down, blasted out by too much or too little contrast.
The resulting game just has none of the verve or passion that made the Jak and Daxter games so damned endearing. Even while I was cursing the idea of trying to get through a free-roaming GTA-lite city or getting hung up on stupid difficulty spikes in Jak II -- until now the series' low point -- I still kept coming back for more. With Lost Frontier I felt absolutely none of that drive at any point; I simply kept playing because I had to for the review.
The biggest source of frustration definitely lies in the use of weapons. Jak's gunstaff can morph into a handful of different options from shotgun to laser-precise beam, but to get the full benefit of the auto-lock, the camera has to be pointed at the targets, and using the shoulder buttons to lazily swing things around takes time. Even still, it's a crapshoot as to whether or not you'll be pointing at the thing you actually want to hit. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the early training run you have to make through an obstacle course where you're instructed not to hit innocents, but the auto-targeting locks onto them anyway. It's a hilariously busted system that could have been fixed by just letting the player hold both shoulder buttons and center on a target to strafe.
The camera often presents a weird viewpoint when performing platforming manuvers too; with no way to control any up/down movement, the default position is often such that it's not quite clear if you're close enough to the edge of a platform to make it. You fall, you die, and the game's... interesting checkpoints (which varies from frustratingly sparse when you need them most to over-diligent when you're just trying to get through an area while backtracking or lost) force you to give it another go. I ended up double-jump-spinning on every jump just to hope I had enough distance. Things like angling the camera in fixed positions during the bar swinging segments left me without the best view to see the next jump or leap down to a safe resting area. The camera is a massive pain in the ass more than it's helpful, and it kills the sense of running and jumping, absolute tenets of the Jak and Daxter experience.
Then there are the Dark Daxter bits. See, Jak's not the only one that can go all mean and angry; Dax ends up getting a Dark Eco bath and turns into a broken English-spouting brute that just spins his way through, well, everything. Poorly. His tornado attack (along with a ground smash, grab and projectile throws) lets him blaze through side-scrolling or isometric-angle crawls through caves and sewers and simply feel like a button mash as you move from left to right, stopping only to grab a spider and throw it at a hole so you can proceed. These segments only crop up a few times, but when they do, they're an eye-rolling exercise in tedium.
