Jak II

Pros • Lots of cool vehicles to use • Excellent, balanced level design • Unbelievable artwork and animation • Huge city to explore • Massive amount of gameplay • Fantastic script • Great characters • Terrific Voice Over Acting	Cons • The challenge level is set quite high—be patient! • The music is mediocre
Bottom Line Jak II is Naughty Dog’s best game. And with excellent titles like the Crash Bandicoot series, Crash Team Racing and the original Jak & Daxter to their name, that’s really all you need to know. As an enormous fan of the original Jak & Daxter, I have been waiting patiently for a sequel for many months. I had very high expectations for this game and happily, Jak II has shot past those expectations with a sonic thunderclap and a smart-ass comment from Daxter, my new favorite smart-ass videogame sidekick. Jak II isn’t, like so many action-adventure sequels are, a mere “give ‘em more of the same” type game featuring some new art in its levels. Jak II is in fact, a game that doesn’t seem to end, nor does it ever seem to stop giving you fun stuff to do. A hybrid of Grand Theft Auto 3, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, a platform game, an action shooter as well as a fantastic collection of arcade memories, Jak II is one of the most addictive and rewarding experiences of this or any other year. And did I mention that it’s Naughty Dog’s best game?

Nowadays, like any big screen success, making a great game starts with a good story. Jak II’s stellar story features an unbeatable combination of a, “good vs. evil” plot, a collection of crazy cartoon characters, some nifty sci-fi special effects and plenty of high-octane action sequences. End result: You forget about your real life while you’re playing this one, which is exactly what we’re looking for from our interactive entertainment, isn’t it?

Somewhere in the distant future, in the heart of a giant, ominous urban sprawl, called Haven City, we find our hero, Jak, imprisoned and tortured by the evil Baron Praxis. Two years have past since the conclusion of the Precursor Legacy and in those two years, Jak has been probed, prodded and experimented on by the nefarious Baron Praxis and his magical Dark Eco—a strange, black goo that transforms Jak into a monster. The game starts out dark and gets darker still. From the outset, we notice that Jak’s demeanor is more sullen and cynical—and frankly, he’s a lot cooler now.

Jak’s first mission (and yours), is to free himself from the clutches of the Baron. Once out on the decrepit streets of Haven City, however, things don’t improve. The neon lit billboards and the hovercars, notwithstanding, Haven City is not a city of progress. Krimzon Guards patrol every street, enforcing the Baron’s tyranny with high-powered rifles, red metal armor and bad attitudes. Citizens cower and obey their oppressors. It ain’t pretty here.

A rebel force does exist in Haven City but is under-populated and overwhelmed by the Baron’s might. After some uncomfortable negotiations, Jak and Daxter agree to aid the rebels on their missions with the understanding that any help they provide will be repaid with assistance to get Jak closer to the Baron for revenge and ultimately, Dax hopes, a one way ticket for Jak & Daxter to return home.

From there, the choice is yours, really. The fun of the game is in the layers that are left for your exploration. You can choose to car-jack a hover car and tool around the city for a while. You can enter a hover-board contest and see how tricky you are. You can try out your weapons in a gun range. Or you can select missions and mini-missions from the myriad checkpoints scattered through the city.

The missions of Jak II are split up into basic gameplay styles.

Vehicle Missions
One vehicle mission may require you to pick up passengers and drop them off, Crazy Taxi-style, at another location. Another vehicle mission may require you to simply race from point A to point B as quickly as possible. Whatever mission you’re on in the hover car, be prepared to dodge a lot of traffic (on two levels--a lower and a higher flight path), as well as the Baron’s gun turrets, and his Krimson Guards that travel on foot and in their own vehicles. Although your desire to rip through Haven City may be strong, just remember, bump into the wrong thing and you’ll have more laser blasts to dodge than Lando faced in the last scenes of Return of the Jedi.

Platform Missions
There are a lot of acrobatic platform hopping style missions to complete in Jak II, and the level design in these missions is fantastic. However these missions are also rife with baddies for Jak to blast, so the action is ferocious.

Combat Missions
Sometimes you just have to start shooting folks. There are Krimson Guards by the legion. Wipe ‘em out. And those Metal Heads? Wipe those freaks out too! And grab their glowing skulls afterward while you’re at it. Those are worth something. This is an action adventure with some serious firepower.

Hoverboard Missions
These missions are tricky because not only do you have maintain stability on your hoverboard, you also have baddies shooting at you and lots of stuff to collect. Completing hoverboard is especially satisfying.

Now here’s the best part: Many of the missions in the game are a combination of all of these elements, so the randomness of the experience is unbelievable. Also, when you add all of the extra things that you get to do, like the hover car races and rail shooters, not to mention the countless collectible objects you get to find and the rewards they provide, you get a game that satisfies on many, many levels.

Tying all of this extraordinary gameplay together is artwork that will take your breath away. Naughty Dog is clearly pushing the PlayStation 2 to its limit. Horizons stretch on forever, massive amounts of moving vehicles and pedestrians populate the screen at once, water sprays out of broken piping, background elements shatter into a million pieces if you run over them, laser fire flies through the air and above you the sky changes day to night and back again—no doubt about it, Jak II is absolutely gorgeous to look at. The cinematic cut-scenes are great as well. Beautifully rendered, with precision camera angles and a bump up in resolution that takes Jak and his cronies to a point that’s just shy of the stuff that Pixar is doing. Couple this animation with the top-notch script writing and voice over work that Jak II also sports and you have a game that definitively proves anything movies can do, games can do better.

The music is a little bit of a letdown in Jak II. It is the only production element that didn’t knock me out. The tunes are interactive and will flow with the gameplay but when you have actions and artwork that are this heroic, it really calls for music that lifts the spirit. Jak needs his own hero’s theme, a la Superman, Batman or Indiana Jones.

The only other thing that might set people back about Jak II is the game’s challenge. This is not an easy game that you’ll be able to plow through in a weekend. There are a lot of missions to accomplish and tons of new things that you’ll discover along the way. You will be retracing your steps and pulling your hair out on your road to 100% completion. Trust me. The enemies are both insidious and tenacious. Be prepared for dust-ups that will emotionally scar you. Perhaps the most challenging thing of all is the fact that despite having the ability to fly your hover car on two different planes, whipping through Haven City at top speed is almost impossible because of the sheer amount of traffic. Those moments of flat out pedal to the metal velocity are exhilarating but all too brief.

To me, however, the challenge was not a deterrent. I was hooked on the gameplay and the story of Jak II almost immediately and my addiction and love of the game hasn’t subsided weeks later. Jak II is, without question, one of the finest gaming experiences I’ve ever had and certainly one of the best games of 2003. Naughty Dog’s masterpiece gets the ten.

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