Jak & Daxter: The Lost Frontier

Once you get past the fact that you can’t look up or down, Jak & Daxter: The Lost Frontier is a great little platform game. The story is acceptable, though not the strongest the series has seen. That’s fine though, since a grander story would seem out of place on a handheld.

As little as five minutes in, you’ll get your first shot of the flight. Which is good, because it’s one of the greatest strengths of the game. You’ll get some different ships to choose from with meaningful differences between how they look and function. From something that looks like a pod racer with propellers to a straight-up fighter jet. The weapons have no less variety: Lasers, machine guns, lock-on missiles and firing Daxter at enemy planes to steal their gear.

At first the biggest problem with the game is its camera. The problems arise from how often the manual control fights the scripted control. As in, you’re standing in an area where the developers have set up the game to show you something, but you were turning the camera to face the enemies attacking you. The result in such cases is that the camera does neither what you or the developer wanted.

With L and R given over to camera control, this worsens some other awkward choices. You see, the d-pad is misused somewhat; up is the next weapon, left is the previous eco power, right is the next eco power and down is use the current eco power. The best solution here would have been to employ radial menus that pause the game and maybe L for powers and R for weapons, then you could have more complete camera control on the d-pad. The rest of the platforming controls work just fine, but when a better solution to the awkward camera and weapon switching is so obvious, you have to wonder how much thought went into them.

But that’s the on-foot control. The flight controls, on the other hand, are quite perfect thank you very much. Without going into the function of every button, the controls are strikingly similar to those of Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack In Time on PS3, except you can fly up and down. It makes your head hurt to think that you can’t look up and down on foot, but you can when flying, whereas it’s the exact opposite in Ratchet & Clank. There’s a conspiracy there.

The difficulty is all over the place, with sequences you could do in your sleep following some of the hardest boss fights the PSP has seen since Mega Man Maverick Hunter X. The flight sections are enjoyably languid compared to some of the PSP-hurlingly-cheap boss fights. This only partly comes back to the controls, but mainly it’s that the bosses are given so much more health, often have backup and usually have abilities beyond your own. They tend to be of the trial and error school of thought. Is that okay for a game that’s supposed to be accessible to younger players? Probably not, and probably beyond most dads helping out too.

Replayability is one of the mainstays of Jak & Daxter games, and it’s nice to see it here despite the game having been developed by others. On finishing the game you get to start again with all your gear on a harder setting in Hero Mode. Harder!? It’s not that bad actually, since you can now spend your precursor orbs on things like invulnerability and infinite ammo. So it’s a nice way to mop up side missions and missed orbs.

Ultimately, High Impact Games have done a great job with Jak & Daxter: The Lost Frontier. You just need to be prepared to put up with a few odd control choices and some horrendous difficulty spikes. It’s not quite as good as Ready At Dawn’s Daxter, but it’s a cracking time none-the-less.