In their quest to be innovative, the developers have flung in so many different tasks that there’s no cohesion between them – no real ‘reason’ for anything to happen. Even without the slick continuity of Renegade and The Precursor Legacy to act as a benchmark, Jak 3 would still feel like a bunch of levels stapled together instead of one big adventure. Nevertheless, note to Naughty Dog: it’s not the size of your game – it’s what you do with it. They’re hiding in places you really wouldn’t expect the average gamer to find. Finding an Orb after following a hunch, or carefully planning to reach a high or distant place, almost always leads to shrill satisfaction. Saving up for extras is a great deal of fun exploring every nook and cranny for errant baubles might sound tedious, but it helps you settle into Jak’s mindset (and really lets you appreciate the magnitude of the gameworld). Chances are you won’t find all 600 Orbs on your first playthrough (at least not without a player’s guide), so choose carefully. The guns can be upgraded in other ways: when you find Precursor Orbs (little eggy things that are awarded for exploration, cool-handedness, or beating mini-games assigned to you by the Freedom League or the wise Precursor statues), you can choose to spend them on increasing your ammo capacity or reload times.Īlso available are extra vehicles (which are disappointingly nothing special compared to the standard ones, which include the very cool Dune Hopper that can make such stupidly-huge leaps across canyons that you’ll never tire of riding it), cool stuff like character viewers and scene and level select and silly stuff like characters in nappies (and the obligatory, unfunny-as-always, ‘big head’ mode). As for what happens to the Peacemaker… well, it’d be churlish to spoil it. Another mod uses the Scatter gun to create a ‘wave’ of energy that ‘concusses’ enemies (clever, see?). One upgrade releases a little flying saucer that shoots enemies with Blaster ammo – leaving you free to use your other guns or else kicks and punches.

Jak 3 sees the four amigos return, with a further two upgrades for each. To recap: the Scatter gun fired short-range pulses that threw enemies back several feet, and was powerful but had an ass-hat reload time the Blaster was your basic equally-good-at-all-ranges pistol the Vulcan Fury had lousy targeting and chewed up ammo like John Prescott at a pastie buffet (but its awesome rate of fire pinned enemies down and could deal with swathes of them at once) and the fluffy-sounding Peacemaker was Naughty Dog’s rendition of the ‘BFG’ (albeit ammo was rarer than chooks’ teeth, the pay-off was utter plasmic devastation). The Morph gun from Jak II makes a comeback, but now has many more mods available for it. The Concussor is one of several new additions to Jak’s arsenal. While this doesn’t make any difference to the gameplay (a missed opportunity there), it does look bastard-woo – as does the heat-haze above flaming torches, the lovingly-crafted rolling vistas and dilapidated cityscapes, the sparkly fragments that some missions require you to pick up, and the intense blast radii of some of the weapons (especially the cackle-inducing Wave Concussor). However, even as a stand-alone game, there are a few issues which can dampen one’s enjoyment of a ‘stand-out’ title that is to platformers (sorry, character-action platformers) what Pokey is to penguinkind.Īs was the case before, Jak 3’s graphics are amazing – especially the stupendous draw distance and the environmental lighting which changes from dawn to dusk to nightfall on a six-minute cycle. As a stand-alone title, Jak 3 is pretty astonishing, not to mention very pretty and all the more remarkable because a vast world has been created with zero loading times there are in fact two primary landmasses – Spargus City and Haven City – which can be shunted between in the Airbus. Reviewers are often criticised for giving sequels lower scores than the originals – ostensibly on the grounds that the sequel lacks the groundbreaking impact that the earlier games had, even though the sequel is in many respects a superior game. Gamestyle Archive Intro: its about time we had one of the great PS2 series’ in the archive and so Jak arrives thanks to a review by Anna dating from November 2004.

Jak 3 scatter gun upgrade