1.5/5 ★ – bokonon764's review of Jak and Daxter: The Lost Frontier.

From the first moments of this game, I knew it would be a pale imitation of the Naughty Dog games. It’s one of two Jak games released on the PSP. Naughty Dog started this one, but passed it off to High Impact Games, as they were too busy with the first Uncharted game. I had never played this one, but it just so happens that as I was replaying all the Jak games, a PS4/5 port was released, so thought I’d give it a whirl. It’s hard to really gauge this game. On the one hand, it’s by far the worse Jak game I’ve played; on the other, it is a PSP release, it’s not gonna be on the level of its PS2 counterparts. But there are plenty of great PSP games that can hang with console games no problem, it’s not much of an excuse that this game sucks. I like the concept of this game. Jak, Daxter, and Keira are searching the edge of the world for eco, as there has been a shortage or some shit. They gave Keira a coat, finally; but, they also changed her face again. The character models in general look a little worse, and I don’t think it can be chalked up to tech limitations. They just changed up the art direction ever so slightly, to where it’s not much different, it’s just annoying. The humor is the same brand of humor, just not as funny. Daxter is still played by Max Casella, thank god, but the writing is no where near as good as earlier installments; not a lot of laughs this time, at least not for me. Anyways, the concept and idea for the game are cool, but it almost immediately takes a dive in quality. There’s sky pirates in this story, which I’m a fan of, but the design of all the new characters is just lame, I don’t know. I spent most of the game wondering why I’m doing what I’m doing. It’s one of those narratives. That’s not a problem for me with every game, but the thing I like about this series is its world and story. Lost Frontier trades the deserts and dune buggies of Jak 3, to an open (ish) sky world with a bunch of different planes to pilot. The plane parts themselves play like a shittier version of Star Fox Assault, which isn’t to say it’s all bad; however, it’s also not great. I had some fun with the plane sections. It really doesn’t feel like any skill is involved; you’re just kind of milling about in a plane, and sometimes you die. The health bar is unintuitive, the amount of time the gam has you slowly flying is boring…it was during one of the these plane missions that I bailed on the game. For some stupid fuckin reason, this game takes away the morph gun and gives you this spear thing that is essentially a morph gun. One of many unnecessary changes in Lost Frontier. The weapon just looks awkward. The ability to aim and the aim assist has never been great in this series, and it’s at its worst here. Early in the game, there’s a gun route shooting gallery thing, and it makes it painfully obvious how terrible the gun combat in this game is. It already wasn’t great in previous titles, but everything that was wrong got worse. One thing I’ll give this game a pass on is its button mapping. First thing I tried to do when I started this game was a roll jump, a mechanic that’s been in every other game. No dice, the triggers just control the camera; PSP doesn’t have that extra stick to control camera as it normally does. Triangle is the fire gun button, not a fan of that either. It just feels awkward. Like I said though, it was a PSP game, so they had less options. Regardless of the button mapping, it controls pretty terribly. Jak has never felt so sluggish; it’s easy to just slide off the edge of a platform I’m jumping to, or get stuck in a crevice. However, when this game does freeze or you get physically stuck, the PS5 version has this weird rewind thing you access by pressing the “options” button. It’s a thing I’ve never seen before, maybe they’re adding it to buggier, older games. Whatever the reason, it was a big help. Overall, Lost Frontier wasn’t a let down: I expected it to be bad. But I at least expected to like the story, as I am so infatuated with the world these games take place in. They added a lot new concepts onto old ideas, and they were bad concepts. One might say High Impact Games really MARred the LEGACY. Get it?