Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy Review

The headline is an engineering one and it still impresses. From the first village to the final citadel the world is one connected space that streams in as you move, with no doors, no lifts and no loading screens hiding the joins, which in 2001 nobody else was attempting at this scale. It would be a curiosity if the game underneath were thin, and it is not. The power cell objectives are varied and short, the platforming is precise, and every biome introduces a movement idea rather than a new coat of paint, from the zoomer races to the flut flut sections to the lurker infested swamps.

The art holds up because it never chased realism, and Daxter's running commentary is genuinely funny in a genre that was mostly not. The weaknesses are of their moment. There is no combat depth to speak of beyond a punch and a spin, the story is a fetch quest with a cliffhanger, and the last stretch spikes the difficulty hard. A beautifully engineered, deeply pleasant game.