I may have reviewed Daxter in passing in my PSP review, but here’s a complete look at it.

Daxter is a PSP-based gaiden to the Jak and Daxter trilogy, which was supposed to have ended after three games. Certainly Naughty Dog’s involvement ended; the creators of Daxter are Ready At Dawn: Daxter is their first game. However, they did well enough with Daxter to go on to make the PSP port of God of War, which I have heard is quite good.

In the time-honoured tradition, Daxter is a cut-down portable clone, so if you’ve played Jak and Daxter, you have a really good guess what the game is like without Jak. I’ll just cover what’s missing. First, because the PSP isn’t as powerful as the PS2, the overworld is missing the people and vehicles that made navigation so fun in the second two games. Second, presumably because Ready At Dawn is a newish company without the funding of Naughty Dog, the gameplay is not as fun.

Why not? The biggest reason is that the tasks aren’t as varied or interesting; there are a couple of hovercraft levels, but most of the game is platforming much more in the style of the first Jak game than the second two. Even then, the level design is much more cramped and linear than the first Jak game—the levels reminded me a lot of Crash Bandicoot (as did the hero, come to think of it). A distant third is interface gaffes that are a sign of (1) new developers, (2) rushed developers or (3) Bioware developers*—a lot of interactions are perfunctory and assume a deep capacity to guess what a game designer might do. Basically, the completely opposite of playing a Mario game, where everything is well-lit and given the proper affordances.

As an aside: This contrasts greatly with the second two Jak games, which were front-runners in the kitchen-sink school of game design. Sure, the world was basically a rip-off of GTA, and none of the activities were new either, but crammed into one smoothly paced, well executed package, nobody could resist it. (At least, I couldn’t.)

While playing, I kept thinking “this is pretty impressive for a portable game", and it is, doubly so since the budget was probably miniscule compared to the PS2 Jak games. But that doesn’t change the fact that the game is a bit boring. It was a good diversion while visiting my parents for Thanksgiving, but that’s just a sign that I need to buy a laptop that can play any game besides Starcraft.

*Or any RPG designer that has never met a human. Origin games are even worse (but a lot older).