I always knew of Jax and Daxter, but never played it simply because I didn’t have enough interest. It’s not that the game looked bad or I thought I wouldn’t enjoy, but there was always something more interesting to me whenever I had a chance to pick this game up. Then during Christmas time there was a deal for buying 1 game getting the other 50% off, and deciding that it was now time, I picked up the Jax and Daxter collection, along with a Christmas present for a friend.
Jax and Daxter, in a lot of ways, reminds me of Crash Bandicoot, and if it weren’t for the fact that the same company made it I would say it’s a total rip-off. While Jax and Daxter does indeed have a different story to tell, and somewhat different mechanics to move it still has the collecting that I have come to know from Crash Bandicoot. As a kid, I loved the Crash Bandicoot series a lot, and I played it mercilessly several times just completing it over and over again. So to play Jax and Daxter I knew it wasn’t going to be hard for me to do the same for the series. Of course, I fell in love with Jax and Daxter for the same fact it reminded me of playing Crash Bandicoot. It wasn’t a kind of, I’m playing Crash Bandicoot again, but I’m playing something like it and I love those kind of games. Collecting is very easy in these types of games because everything is counted for you, and if you look hard enough eventually you’ll find everything you need. The platforming, while a bit annoying, is still very much the same as well. Platforming requires a good amount of skill, but it’s never to the point where it can get hair pulling. Transitions amongst the levels are also very subtle and often I discovered new areas without even trying. The game is highly addicting as well, often I tell myself I get off it once I was done getting another power orb only to find I was saying that same phrase 10 times before.
As for the faults I had with it, it comes down to two major ones. While the game does explain controls and the gaming mechanics to you; it never quite gets to telling you about advance techniques that you can use throughout you’re adventure. I was nearly half way through the game till I found out that I could use Jak’s spinning move to extend my jumping, as well I was nearly done with the game itself till I found out about rolling jumps. Just these small things that make me wonder why the game just never got around to telling me about them. Both techniques are useful and required to complete the game 100% yet I had to find out about them through the internet. The other major fault I see lies with the story. While it certainly isn’t bad by any means I often wondered why I was just learning things just now. You don’t even meet the villains of the game till halfway through, and they never really seem that menacing. It’s just to the point that the game never felt like an adventure to stop evil, and when they shoehorn it in, it just gets awkward. Like, for some reason the story felt rushed in the end, like they had something going, but they just decided to leave the awkward pacing it had. In a lot of ways Jax and Daxter seems to have scenes missing throughout the game, and while they’re not that important to the story, it would have cleared up some confusion.
Final Thought: Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy is a very fun game for fans of games like Crash Bandicoot and Sypro the Dragon. It takes a lot of the same mechanics that made those games good and mixes it with its own to make another adventure for itself. Although often I was confused by the pacing of the story, and perplexed why the game never taught me all its techniques to play it. Jax and Daxter is still a good game overall.