Jak and Daxter: The Lost Frontier Review

I am going to start off the review by saying I never even planned on playing this game, I spent years avoiding it because I always heard how "bad" it was and even from some other people on how they were also lukewarm on the series like I was saying that the game isn't good.

If it hadn't been for the game appearing on PS Premium Classics and me playing it on that for a couple of hours, I wouldn't even have played Lost Frontier at all. However, do not buy the PS Classics version as of now since there is a Far Drop crash quarter way into the game that I recall not being patched, however due to me giving up on waiting for a patch, I emulated the PS2 version and simpily put, the PS2 version is the way to play the game, the controls are far superior in the PS2 version than the PSP and emulated version on PS5. Mainly due to the weapon selection being on the D pad and the eco ability shortcuts, the latter is a big reason why I adovocate playing the PS2 version since the shortcuts are a far more intuitive way of using them rather than individually selecting them on the D pad. Being able to use all your abilities at once without switching just makes the game less clunky to play. You can just reach a spot to use your contextual eco power and then immediately use it without, awkwardly cycling through your ability to use the power you want. Shoot weapon is also mapped to R1 on PS2 and camera control is right stick adding more reasons to play the PS2 version.

Sony made a bad move by having the PS5 version be an emulated PSP version rather than choosing the PS2 version. The Far Drop crash as of now only adds insult to injury.

With that finally out of the way, I liked the game A LOT more than I thought I was going into it, I was expecting myself to drop the game after a few hours because I heard there is a huge emphasis on aerial combat and that there is barely any platforming, so I was expecting it to be a repeat of Jak 3 where instead of endless mini games, it's aerial combat and to my immense surprise, there is a good amount of platforming, more so than Jak 3 ever did. The first few sections of the game had a good amount of it, the aerial combat was there but it was more of a pace breaker along with the Dark Daxter sections.

What surprised me was how Lost Frontier during it's on foot sections, introduced new abilities, gave me a little while to get the hang of it and then gave me sections where I had to use those abilities during gameplay challenges. For example, I got a statue displacement power, the game introduced it to me to get s grasp on it and then I was doing a bunch of statue displacement powers to get furthur through the platforming gaunlet, the slo mo power even gets more use than it did in Jak 3 all though I would've liked more mandatory use of it.

Another example and the best bits of game design is when you have to use the statue displacement ability in conjunction with your other powers to name two examples, I had to use the eco crystals and the statue displacement in conjuction to across to the other side of the level, or how I had to use the eco shield and the displacement ability together to get past a pool dark eco and get line of sight on the statues as certain parts were rising. I was not expecting this at all especially with how Jak 2 had boring open world traversal, and Jak 3 was mini game overload. I just wished the game had more stuff like this because it could've been a stand out game in a series were I am not a big fan of it's direct sequels.

The aerial combat is decently fleshed out but it's either too hard or too easy. Your default ship is insanely weak but if you use the Sky Raider, the combat for the most part becomes a little bit too easy and the game has a heavy emphasis on it and it never managed to find the right difficulty.

Other issues I have is that I was bummed that roll jump, long jump and hoverboard are gone but I gave up on Jak leaning it's into it's movement mechanics a while ago.

The aforementioned aerial combat just hits in the realm of "okay" and the Dark Daxter sections are too few and far between to even be worth talking about.

The gunplay and moment to moment combat isn't very good, you don't have a dodge button still and still no ability to strafe and most of it just consist of spamming imbuse and using powerful weapons like chaingun to kill enemies until they die. Like the aerial combat and Dark Daxter sections, it isn't "great" but for the most part it's serviceable yet again, I gave up on the series trying to integrate combat and platforming seemlessly together a while ago.

Overall, if Lost Frontier just leaned into the game design I mentioned earlier, I would glowingly recommend the game but as it stands, it's an enjoyable game in a series where the only games I like are Precursor Legacy, Daxter and Jak X. It surpassed my extremely low expectations I had for it. It's a decently made game for the bad reputation I always heard it had.