The final game in the inovative Jak and Daxter series.

Early in the life of the ps2, came a pretty much bog standard platformer called Jak and Daxter, where the player went around levels collecting orbs, Banjo-Kazooie style, trying to save his friend who had been turned into an Ottsel. That sentence pretty much summed up the gameplay, which was mostly platforming with the occasional minigame (usually a racing minigame). Suffice to say, it went on for about 10, 15 hours then ended. If you collected 100 orbs, you saw a special ending where the heroes unearthed a weird ring... and then it ended, which made the ending a bit disappointing.
But the game's main claim to fame was it was the first where the player could play from beginning to end without seeing a single load time, thanks to it's streaming technology.
It was pretty obvious from the ending that the developers wanted to make a sequel, however then better and more original games came along, and so everyone forgot about it for a while.

A scene from the opening. The game uses it's own engine for the cutscenes, which really highlights how good the graphics are here

Skip forward a year and a bit, to when Naughty Dog lift the lid on Jak 2. Everyone is expecting another platformer, however Naughty Dog have gone with one of those oddball decisions that when they go right, give us a great game.
Rather than the peaceful, low-tech word of the previous one, Jak 2 was set 100 years in the future in a large, futuristic city. The game borrowed elements from GTA, including a living city and a mission based structure. The platforming was still there in many missions, but took it's place alongside racing, shooting and fighting missions (as well as more minigames).
The plot was different too. Rather than just have to contend with animals egged into fighting, the game now featured three factions warring for control of the city. There was the despotic ruler of the city, the Baron and his army, who captured and experimented on Jak at the start of the game and against whom Jak now wanted revenge; the metalheads, whose only goal seemed to be wiping everyone else off of the face of existence and against whom the city was being besieged by, and the rebels who were trying to take over power for themselves.
It also added guns, and the ability for Jak to turn into an incredible hulk-style monster.
The game received much praise from reviewers, it's only flaw being it's difficulty, which fluctuated wildly and was often extremely frustrating. Especially in some of the racing games, which would have been alright had they been optional, but they were compulsory to completing the game.

Grrr!

Anyway, history lesson over. Now, the final game in the series has been released.
The game starts with Jak being thrown into the wasteland, a desert area where about half of the game takes place. This consists of a small city, and a massive expanse of desert, all with the same streaming technology that means the user never sees a loading screen.
When Jak eventually find his way back, the fighting in the city continues, now between the rebels who briefly took control of it, the metalheads who have managed to invade part of the city and turn it into their nest, and a new force of robots that has mysteriously appeared. A couple of areas of the city are identical to the previous game, but most have been redone to represent the changes that have happened in between the two games. Some areas are now completely destroyed, some areas have turned into a battleground between the rebels and either the metalheads or the new robot army, others have been laid waste to by the metalheads and now resemble some sort of weird, alien nest.

The game is packed with nice little touches, such as Daxter whipping out the gun whilst in a hovercar

Gameplay wise, the game is similar to the last one, but with some major balancing tweaks. Or to be more exact, they have toned down the monstrous difficulty from the previous game. The player has more HP, so they are not taken down quite as easily, there is now the ability to heal using white magic, and bottomless pits are less cheaply used. Don't misunderstand, the game isn't too easy, however you will no longer be throwing the controller on the floor in frustration either. The difficulty has also been toned down a little in the racing and minigames, however depending on what the player is used to, some are still frustrating.
New to the game are off road vehicles, which the player can either buy or earn, which are mostly used in the wasteland missions, which are new to the series, and mostly involve either racing through the desert, or attacking other cars. Apart from that, the missions are mostly the same as in the previous game. Interestingly, there are a couple of things, such as the hover board, the hovercraft and to some extent the morph gun, which only have few missions in this game where they are actually used. This is fair enough, because they were used in the previous game a lot, and are really just still in the game for the sake of completeness - and to give the player different ways of completing a mission.
Certainly the series has come a long way from the running, jumping and punching in the first game. If you want, you can still punch most enemies to death, but by the end of Jak 3 you will have a serious amount of arse-kicking potential. As well as the four weapons and the dark moves from Jak 2, you now have 8 new weapons (my favourite of which include a big grenade launcher, a little drone that follows you for a second, shooting everything that moves, and what can probably only be described as a mini-warhead - when you fire it, the explosion is so great that the screen goes white and all sound stops for a few seconds, and when you can see again everything around you is dead... the final weapons are really over the top. ^_^)
A couple of disappointing new moves were the invisibility and the wings/flying move. While these are pretty cool, they're only ever needed in certain places, and the game makes it extremely obvious where these are by putting a recharge pad right in front of them.

Healing magic, thank god!

Not to mention the streaming, the graphics in the game are great, and really show off what the ps2 can do. With Jak 3, you have a team who have been playing with the ps2 for ages, know the console inside out, and it really shows. The game is very well animated (and there's a documentary/commentary on the disk where the animators talk about it!) and has a lot of comedy in places. (You might take one look at Daxter and have him down as just an annoying animal sidekick, which is admittedly partly what Naughty Dog was going for, but he will make you laugh on more than one occasion.) There was more than one cutscene that me bursting out laughing.

Any major flaws I should mention? Well, just a couple, and they are confined to small areas of the game. But they will annoy you when you get to them.
The first is that a couple of minigames have escaped the balancing. One in a car racing through a pipe is particularly annoying - the track features many holes and gaps, which lead to an instant death. The car moves so fast, and the view ahead is so restricted, that there's no way that you can see them coming before you have fallen down them, meaning the only way to clear the course is to just repeatedly try blind, and learn the layout off by heart as you die.
The second is the camera controls in certain minigames. They often reverse the up/down directions, which is frustrating because you don't expect it, and there's no way to turn that off. In one the left/right is reversed too, which is just stupid.

Now that's what I call a gun!

So, should you buy Jak 3? If you've played and enjoyed the last game, then yes, this is better! If you played but hated the last game, then you might still enjoy this because the difficulty is less of a problem, but it is still the same sort of thing.
If you've never played any of the series, then you can get away without playing #1 (which has no related plot), but knowledge of at least the plot in #2 would be helpful.

Oh, yes, a score. Great game, I give it a 9/10