A game flawed on so many levels.
The flaws in Jak II are numerous. I'll start with the overall game design. The first question I had to ask myself upon playing this was "What was so wrong with the original Jak and Daxter?" Apparently, according to Naughty Dog, a lot. It seems they felt the light-hearted cartoony tone was one of the myriad of problems with Jak and Daxter. Jak II's change in tone is so jarring that it's hard to believe the first game was even part of the same series. Jak not only talks now, but he's an angry, violent man. Daxter has changed too. Throughout the game he deals out a number of dirty jokes, and even stares fixatedly at the ridiculous cleavage on one of the female characters. The bright colours from the original are completely gone in favour of the dreariness of Haven City.
The designers also must have felt that the gameplay itself needed reworking. It feels like they sat down and asked themselves what games people liked and then made a game that was based on the gameplay from them. Of most note are Grand Theft Auto III and Ratchet and Clank, because the end product feels mostly like a merging of those two games. The problem is, while GTA III created an amazing sandbox world to play in, and Ratchet and Clank provides a fun action-platforming experience, Jak II fails to live up to the standards of either game.
The sandbox of Haven City is so dull and uninteresting, that its size is simply annoying. It is quite large, but there are only a few different architectural styles throughout the whole city, and there is absolutely NOTHING to do besides a few obviously placed mini-missions scattered about. There is no reason to explore. Flying about is even more irritating. The flying vehicles handle terribly, especially through the many narrow corridors of the city. The traffic is so heavy, it makes it virtually impossible to get around the other slow-moving vehicles easily. Many of the vehicles take very little damage before being destroyed. Flying at ground level (which is easier than avoiding the traffic) has its own problems as even nicking one of the many guards wandering about will have the whole city on alert. However, you can, it seems, kill innocent civilians without any consequence, which only further demonstrates how different the tone of this game is from its predecessor. The missions you undertake in the game occur in only a handful of locations, and you will spend minutes at a time simply getting from point A to point B. This wouldn't be as big of a deal if getting around was more fun than it is. Unfortunately, the traveling is tedious.
Using the few guns you get in the game isn't particularly fun, either. It's frequently difficult to lock on to the enemy you want to, and not always obvious who you're going to hit. This makes from some extremely frustrating moments especially on the many occasions when you're faced with hordes of enemies.
The difficulty level in Jak II goes beyond overkill. There are plenty of games I thoroughly enjoy that have some difficult sequences, but practically every mission in this game is frustrating on some level. Some use annoyingly restrictive time limits, while many others are frustrating due to a practical lack of any more than one checkpoint per level. At times, a death after getting through a difficult segment will result in having to not only redo the difficult part, but much of what preceded it as well. While many other games recognize this as a potential problem and provide checkpoints before and after difficult segments, Jak II seems to think that it's fun to constantly replay the same parts over and over again.
The missions are frequently mind-bogglingly stupid. At one point in the game, you have to escort a group of people through the sewers (who supposedly know where they're going) while you are bombarded with tons of badguys. Of course, had they had the reasonable foresight to bring a ladder, they could have walked practically from the entrance to the sewers right to their final destination without the hassle. Another time I had to protect a "hideout" from kamikaze droids. After taking all three of them out, I had to wonder what would stop them from returning. It was no longer much of a hideout if the bad guys knew where it was.
The story is also incredibly weak. It's not a difficult to figure out exactly what's going to happen at the end of the game, as insanely obvious clues are dropped right into your lap. When the revelations that you already figured out finally come, they're executed with so little drama that they hardly feel revelatory at all. The characters are all so one-note that when their personalities differ for even a moment it feels incredibly strained. In one instance, Jak expresses a tiny bit of compassion and it just comes across as laughable. The story leaves you wondering what exactly the point of virtually everything you did in the game was for. A few words of explanation from the ultimate bad guy are given, but don't really do much to satisfy the player. Too much of the game seems tacked on to artificially inflate the length and difficulty.
On another note, one of the characters resembles Jar Jar Binks so much, it seems the developers don't realize he was one of the most loathed characters in cinematic history. To give Jar Jar some credit, the character I refer to in Jak II is even harder to understand.
The game has some brief enjoyable moments when the fun style of gameplay from the original is implemented, but this is so rarely the case, and the rest of the game is so frustrating that it doesn't really help the overall experience.
I feel that if Naughty Dog wanted to make a game of this type it would have helped greatly if they'd left Jak and Daxter alone and started a whole new series.