Going from the first Jak game to this was a real stinker. I’m not going to hold back on this title at all. The first game was a fun little platformer where you’d bounce from one map to another. This one has this “huge” open world that you have to constantly traverse to get to different areas. It really sucks in todays landscape. If I look back at it and try to understand what the game was and how it was received in the context of it’s time, then yes, it really swung for the fences.
The game has an adult sense of humor, especially for a mascot platformer for PlayStation. This is when you can still have a more edgy factor to your humor. Just look at some of these images to get a better understanding of some of the stuff going on here.
The gameplay is what really drug this title down for me and made me want to give up on it. I hate the open world map they give you for a hub world. You can run but you’ll mostly use a flying car to get around this map. Usually you’ll pick up your next mission and have to navigate to the opposite side of the map. The hub world is cramped, with plenty of blind turns and vehicles to run into constantly. This is a game design choice that only became possible with the power of the PS2 and today feels like garbage. I can’t state enough just how much I didn’t like getting around.
You then get to your mission area and that’s all well and good. The issue there is that you’ll have another mission that brings you right back to the same environment but you have to do something slightly different in it, it felt boring and repetitive.
It eventually got to the point where I didn’t want to play it anymore and I found online that you can actually access the developer tools to enable all sorts of cheats and stuff like that. One popped me at the final boss and would even hit every trophy for the game. Kind of wild actually.
Final Score – 5.8
I just couldn’t with this game. I know the history of it and I even owned it for the PS2 way back in the day. Times have changed and so has game design. Could they make a new version of this series, rebooted and with modern design architecture, absolutely. Should a studio like Naughty Dog do that, absolutely not. This was more interesting as a study of game design and how that’s changed over the past two decades.
Ghost Ba Bomb 