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Daxter
Duration/Variety: 6
Gameplay: 6
Story/Pacing: 3
Visual Quality: 6
Sound Quality: 7
Impression: 7
5.6
There aren't a lot of games to play on the PSP - well not a lot of good ones.
So recently I have undertaken to playing some older PSP games (found pretty cheap) that I heard good things about.
One of those games was Daxter.
This game is a plain vanilla platform game - there is a set of core game mechanisms around which a bunch of levels have been built. Daxter does not have a lot of those mechanisms, in fact there is only move, melee attack, jump and an interesting take on jump propulsion: you are given a bug sprayer that can spray different kinds of bug poison, each of which can propel you upwards if you spray it vertically down. And it is really with this relatively meager feature set that the whole game is built - and it's not bad at all.
It does not do anything to advance the genre meaningfully, and as a matter of principle I think that is a bad thing. There is something in the game that looks like the beginnings of a HUB (a place where you can walk around and determine what mission you want to undertake next), but it's vastly underutilized, since I was only able to undertake only one mission at any one time, and you are specifically told what it is. Not that having a choice of which mission to undertake would meaningfully alter my impression that the mission structure and story progression were simply there to provide a backdrop for why you are killing bugs. I guess what I am saying is that even if there was a fully functional HUB in the game, I am not sure it would serve any purpose.
It looks like the idea to create and publish such a game came from the fact that Daxter is one half of an established Playstation franchise. No one seemed to be compelled to make a really good game, or motivate the player through a well written storyline (even a humorous one) - it really looks like someone just made this game "by the numbers". The only thing that really stands out is the music soundtrack - I found myself humming the loops that constantly play in the background while you play.
That's not to say that it's not enjoyable. The game features are really solid, some levels are quite interesting and overall some of the writing is not too cheesy. There are a few interesting minigames (dream sequences) where Daxter takes the role of the hero in various popular movies (like the Matrix, Lord of the Rings, Braveheart etc). These are really cool and fun, but without something to motivate you to go back and play them again (say like the XBOX 360 achievements) they are nothing more than an interesting gimmick.
This review sounds too negative, but ultimately the game is enjoyable. In the barren PSP games landscape, I would recommend it in a heartbeat.
This game is a plain vanilla platform game - there is a set of core game mechanisms around which a bunch of levels have been built. Daxter does not have a lot of those mechanisms, in fact there is only move, melee attack, jump and an interesting take on jump propulsion: you are given a bug sprayer that can spray different kinds of bug poison, each of which can propel you upwards if you spray it vertically down. And it is really with this relatively meager feature set that the whole game is built - and it's not bad at all.
It does not do anything to advance the genre meaningfully, and as a matter of principle I think that is a bad thing. There is something in the game that looks like the beginnings of a HUB (a place where you can walk around and determine what mission you want to undertake next), but it's vastly underutilized, since I was only able to undertake only one mission at any one time, and you are specifically told what it is. Not that having a choice of which mission to undertake would meaningfully alter my impression that the mission structure and story progression were simply there to provide a backdrop for why you are killing bugs. I guess what I am saying is that even if there was a fully functional HUB in the game, I am not sure it would serve any purpose.
It looks like the idea to create and publish such a game came from the fact that Daxter is one half of an established Playstation franchise. No one seemed to be compelled to make a really good game, or motivate the player through a well written storyline (even a humorous one) - it really looks like someone just made this game "by the numbers". The only thing that really stands out is the music soundtrack - I found myself humming the loops that constantly play in the background while you play.
That's not to say that it's not enjoyable. The game features are really solid, some levels are quite interesting and overall some of the writing is not too cheesy. There are a few interesting minigames (dream sequences) where Daxter takes the role of the hero in various popular movies (like the Matrix, Lord of the Rings, Braveheart etc). These are really cool and fun, but without something to motivate you to go back and play them again (say like the XBOX 360 achievements) they are nothing more than an interesting gimmick.
This review sounds too negative, but ultimately the game is enjoyable. In the barren PSP games landscape, I would recommend it in a heartbeat.