Let me start by saying I only ever played the original Jak and Daxter until recently. I loved it a decade ago, and I enjoyed replaying it on my vita the last couple of weeks.

I never really got the chance to play the rest of the trilogy because I was stuck in a desert somewhere in the Middle East when Jak 2 and 3 came out. I always knew I would play them one day and the HD remake collection was my golden opportunity. Add to that, I've been hearing all these wonderful things on the forums over the years about how Jak 2 was the greatest in the trilogy for being dark, revenge game with an open world... so it goes without saying I was actually pretty excited to jump back in to the franchise.

I made a terrible mistake going into this game with high hopes. See, I was under the impression that this was going to be another platformer. You know with hidden collectible in an explorable, slightly bigger world. I thought I was going to search every nook and cranny in a variety of environments that were seamlessly connected.

Yeah I know I'm probably way late too the party to share my opinion on a 10 year old game, but I felt it necessary because of how flawed it is. First the distances you have to travel to progress in the game are just painful. I appreciate Naughty Dog trying to make an extremely large open world game but it just ended up being a  nuisance between you and your objective because the open world has nothing to offer. It works in Grand Theft Auto because you have the option to fool around, find collectables and do side missions, etc.

Second, and this would probably be the the number one rebuttal to my first criticism, the vehicles. "But hatmoza you haz teh vehicles!" Listen. I have played many games with terrible controls in my time. But the vehicles in Jak 2 take the fucking cake. Aside from the painful controls, you have the option to hover close to the ground or above the ground. When you travel close to the ground, you spend 90% of the time running over pedestrians with a high risk of hitting a patrol officer (another issue I'll get to later). When you hover above the ground there's absolutely no way you can drive your vehicle without slamming into oncoming traffic every 5 seconds, which adds more clunkiness to the already clunky driving controls.

Well crap I have to rush this now since I have to go.

Last patrols. The game is pretty much over once you alert security because the AI is mentally challenged. They respawn until you eventually die.

I'm only like five hours into the game and I'm bored to bits. The only time I have fun is when I'm outside the town in a platformy-ish type environment. I'm gonna try to give this game another chance.

Does the game get better?

Jak 2 is by far, in my opinion, the best Jak game ever made.

A friend of my father first showed me Jak & Daxter when it was on the PS2, and I didn't really "enjoy" it, but it was a decent game for me at that time, a few months or years later he told me that he had Jak 2, and I didn't even finished Jak & Daxter, so I went to his place with very low expectatives, and when I played it, I have to say that, to date, it is one of the best games I have ever played, even better than any game of my beloved Ratchet & Clank franchise, and Jak 3 was a good one as well.

So it comes to which genre you like, Jak & Daxter is a decently-done platformer (not as good as Crash Bandicoot or Sly Cooper though) and Jak 2 and 3 are more like an open world weapon-based combat game (not as refined as Ratchet & Clank's combat play), but they all are great games in my opinion.

I can't say the same about The Lost Frontier.

You're supposed to escape the patrols, not fight an army of armed guards heads on lol

I wouldn't call it a bad game, but it is definitely my least favourite game of the series, I only finished it because I wanted to see the story and refused to admit that I couldn't beat the game. But overall I agree with you, the vehicle handling is terrible, enemy patrols are a huge pain in the butt, if you accidentally hit them during a timed mission then you're pretty much fucked, and there are these long missions where if you die you'll have to start all the way from beginning.

Still, if you do have time I'd suggest you to give Jak 3 a try, it fixed almost all the problems that I had with Jak 2, the vehicle control is much better and the missions are quite interesting imo, it's actually my favourite game of the series even after the bad time I had with the second one.