Jak II
Review
2024-05-11
Man, I must have picked this game up when it came out because I read in Game Informer or something that it was kind of like GTA. Upon immediately finding out that it was in fact NOT GTA I promptly bounced off and never came back. That original black label copy is still sitting on my bookshelf and 20 years later I came back to play it, admittedly on the digital PS4 version. And wow I am pleasantly surprised how good of a game it is.
The first thing that hits you is the graphics. This must have been a stunning game back in 2003 if you had the right TV and cables for your PS2 and playing the PS4 version it looks gorgeous even in 2024. The sheer scale of the city, how far you can see, all the detailed, whimsical animations on the characters, the amount of NPCs on the screen it's all so impressive. Again, even in 2024. Hell even the in-engine cutscenes look great. Tying it all together is great, great art direction. The city, the baron, all the monsters, the fucking floating blob of Krew. Well and then you have the egregious female character designs...incredibly 2003.
After your eyes adjust you're then playing a very 2003 game. That's right, a whole bunch of platforming with a ton of minigames and some shooting thrown in for good measure. The platforming is pretty solid, not the best but certainly pretty fun. The shooting is surprisingly really solid. Since it's a third person game your guns have a red dot sight that extends pretty far plus the game assists with a bit of auto targeting. The result is something that feels really fun. And you know the minigames might just be my favorite. You got some rhythm games, you got whackamole, racing, skateboarding, etc. And that's all well and good but that's before discussing the difficulty.
The thing about Jak II is it's notorious for its difficulty with one of the developers even saying, "One thing that everybody can agree on though, is that the game is just way too fucking hard." The core of this is the utter dearth of checkpoints. There are probably 5-10 missions in this game that are actually difficult. Not "difficult for kids", straight up difficult. And almost all of them are because if you make a couple mistakes it's over and back to start. Now, most of these are like 3 minutes long but depending on the one in question you will be doing it 10-20+ times because you have to learn how to do the whole thing perfectly. Some of my favorites: the races are brutal because they're five laps, you can damage your bike which either permanently slows it down requiring a restart or destroys it...requiring a restart. Plus any mistakes and the enemy catches up. The Baron boss fight is brutal because you have to deal with wonky control where you press one direction but since Jak is facing another direction you miss. The slums fight has you fighting something like 100-200 enemies, all of which you basically need to kill, with no heals, and if you die you restart. There's a turret mission where you have to kill 40 flying guards without dying. And they can hide in places you can't hit them. There are a bunch of escort missions that are annoying and the last one has you doing some puzzles and platforming for like 3 minutes and if you mess up once you have to start the whole thing over. That probably took me 10+ tries. The one upside of the difficulty is I felt pretty pumped after finishing most of the ones I've listed. There was an actual element of mastery involved. It's a weird feeling to find in a game that's not from FromSoft in 2024. But then, that's how a lot of games used to be. Still, a lot of these challenges were absolutely more frustrating than they should have been.
Other than that you got a story which is actually decently engaging. You have fun characters and the writing can actually be pretty funny at times. Oh also the music is weirdly bad. You can tell they held on to the style from the Crash games which were just never good at all and they really didn't step it up. It's actually a weird one that no one mentions because it's honestly fucking mediocre as all hell for how good the rest of the game is.
It's weird that when I booted up the game I was platforming in the first level and missed a jump near the end of the section and it sent me to the start and I sat there stupefied that that just happened and there really was no checkpoint. After the 3rd time it happened I genuinely was like "Ok I think I've seen enough let's turn this off." And thank god I didn't because it really was a blast to play. The difficulty is frustrating as hell at times but weirdly a strength most of the time. Definitely a recommend even in 2024.