Daxter E3 2005 Hands-On

We were fortunate enough to go hands-on with Daxter at Sony's E3 booth today. The game is the result of a collaboration between Jak & Daxter creators Naughty Dog and Ready At Dawn Studios, a company founded by former members of that developer and Blizzard. The game puts the crazy orange ottsel, voiced by Max Casella, into his first starring role on a PSP platformer that should have anyone who's a fan of the recent Jak games pretty excited.

Daxter (the game) tells the story of Daxter's life in the two years after he and Jak were transported to the futuristic Haven City and before he got around to rescuing Jak from the clutches of Baron Praxis. Strangely enough, it seems Daxter became an exterminator during this time, which explains why he's armed with a bug swatter and a powerful spray can during his new platforming adventure. There are a ton of things you can do with these two weapons. The swatter lets you perform a number of combos and a dash attack, depending on how you use it, and you can use the can to spray enemies and cause a respectable amount of damage. You can also spray the can into a fire to turn it into a flamethrower, or jump and then spray it downward to hover for a few seconds.

On top of this, Daxter has some other useful powers. Since he's a small animal, he can drop to all fours and squeeze into tight places that people wouldn't normally be able to get to. You can also use this crouched position to sneak up on enemies that haven't noticed your presence and then pounce on them in order to perform a silent kill. Daxter can also climb up certain walls (and you can even attack enemies with the swatter in this position). Of course, the good old butt-stomp is here, too. When we've played as Daxter in past Jak games, his play mechanics were the same as Jak's, so we're really impressed that Ready At Dawn has come up with totally new gameplay to accompany Daxter's first solo adventure. Even in its early state, the game contains a lot of really solid platforming action.

Daxter may not play exactly like a Jak game, but it sure looks like one. In fact, Daxter is just about the best-looking game we've seen on the PSP to date, and it's really not that far behind the PS2 games in terms of visual quality, aside from the expected detail reductions like texture resolution. The in-engine cutscenes feature the same wonderfully exaggerated animation as the Jak games, and Daxter even has real fur now, which is pretty impressive to see close-up. We found Daxter to represent a noticeable increase in visual quality over a lot of the launch PSP titles we've seen recently, which bodes well for the future of the system (and Ready At Dawn, presumably).

Since Daxter is set in a time before Jak II, don't expect to see a ton of familiar faces, simply because our heroes haven't met them yet. But the game will contain a similar cast of personable characters in typical Jak & Daxter style, and we were told that some of the later characters in the series, such as Errol and Count Veger, will make brief appearances. This series has always had surprisingly strong story elements, considering it belongs to a genre that doesn't exactly depend on a coherent narrative, and it looks like Daxter will admirably continue this tradition with a new addition to the story that fans will appreciate.

Apparently, there's a lot more to Daxter than Sony, Naughty Dog, or Ready At Dawn are prepared to talk about. For instance, you'll be able to collect metalhead skulls like in the Jak games, which you can then cash in for all kinds of goodies (but we weren't told exactly what kind they would be). We were also told that Daxter will contain what will amount to nearly an entire second game within the main one (but again, we don't know what that means and won't for some time). The game isn't due out until 2006, so we'll have a while to wait until we can get our hands on it again, but we'll certainly bring you more as soon as we can. For now, you can watch for a live demo of the game on GameSpot's live E3 2005 show tomorrow, May 19.