I would have rated this game higher if not for utterly outrageous difficulty spikes that feel cheap and unfair. Yet, for some odd reason, I kept coming back despite almost rage quitting this game multiple times. The game did enough right for me to want to see it to the end or perhaps I succumbed to Stockholm syndrome.

What would have helped the difficulty feel fair would be to have both consistent and sensible checkpoints. When a mission had a sensible checkpoint it often felt jarring because of how incompetent the rest of the games checkpoints felt.

Jak II is a radical departure, in terms of tone and level design, from Jak and Daxter. Gone is the silent protagonist and a light cartoonish tone. Daxter is still present to throw out annoying and forced comic relief, but this time a few of his jokes actually landed for me. He's still problematic with how lusty he is towards all the female characters, and sadly the female character's cleavage has more depth than their personalities like last time. Ashlein has some character growth, but it's pretty trite in it's beat and she is still a highly sexualized character.

The writing feels about on par with the original. The plot has some twists thrown in which are alright and I do appreciate how the game mocks the absurdity of some of these reveals. Still, it's mostly a serious game with forced silly moments. The highlights would be during an early mission when you need to retrieve a flag. The original games collectible music starts to play, to only be unceremoniously halted with the platform crumbling. There's another moment like this towards the end of the game that's better and I won't spoil it.

My biggest issue with the writing is how I never had any idea what the hell was going on. Each mission briefing is mostly gibberish with the mission briefer pontificating or soliloquizing over some bullshit. Fortunately it didn't really matter for most of the missions. I never really found any of the characters likeable or clever. It felt like a cheap imitation of GTA 3 (to be fair I haven't played that game since it's original release so it's possible I would find the writing equally grating now).

The missions all boil down to either "kill things," "destroy things," "collect things," "escort things" or "race things." Rinse and repeat for the whole game. To be fair, GTA 3 can also be broken down to this structure. To further compound this repetition, the game will have you go back to the same zone multiple times. Each time you return, something usually is altered to give the level a fresh spin, still I cannot help but feel the original game did this better. Instead of having to leave and re-enter each zone between collectibles in the original you could tackle all objectives before leaving. This was a more elegant approach and forced the devs to create interlooping levels to keep the momentum of the game moving forward. With the new mission structure, the devs no longer needed to worry about elegant level design. Sometimes an objective will loop you to the beginning of an area but that occurred pretty rarely.

There are some specific missions that need to be mentioned...

Racing missions were incredible frustrating due to flimsy ship (my bike was destroyed countless times by nicking walls or other racers) and needing to use a short cuts to win. Driving normally feels like driving on ice, with turning being delayed and slow (the racing bike felt significantly more responsive and tracks were better designed for the bad driving mechanics to alleviate this). I found it impossible to drive through the city without hitting a military guard...The flimsy bike creates a narrow margin for error and what makes that unfair is how you aren't trained to drive like this making the challenge come out of no where. If it weren't mandatory I wouldn't mind it... this issue could have been fixed if the streets weren't so narrow. GTA gives plenty of space for you to maneuver. Everything in Jak 2 feels claustrophobic which is incongruent with the janky and unresponsive controls.

Aiming is clumsy and unreliable. An issue with auto aim systems is not having control over your target. For most of Jak it isn't problematic but there are a few missions, which are mandatory, that throw hordes of enemies at you. Even if you play perfectly, you can still fail since there aren't I-frames for Jak unless he is hit. Thus when you have a veritable horde of enemies on screen, it's all a die roll if you get hit enough to die. Destroy Ship at Drill Platform is one of the worst designed pieces of shit I had to endure. Surviving phase 1 of a multi-stage level requires a combination of good RNG and high skill play. The game throws a horde of 40 enemies at you and you must aim your gun to blast them. Maybe they will hit you, maybe not. Fuck it. Roll a die. What compounds the poor design of this level is being forced to aim with inverted controls... in addition this level is mandatory...

I think having difficulty reliant on RNG would be ok if a challenge was optional (i think it would still be bad design but at least I could skip it). The next terrible mission is Escape the Docks... you are on a narrow board walk and hordes of guards (between 75-100) are thrown at you. You have no way to dodge bullets so it again boils down to pure RNG no matter how well you play... and it's mandatory... cool. O and if you accidentally fall off the narrow boardwalk, instant death... cool.

What's funny about the two outrageously bad missions above is that in speedrunners use a glitch to completely skip these awful sequences. I don't blame them...

There were plenty of other missions that made me rage, but they pale in comparison to the ones mentioned above. I did have issues with "Protect hideout from bombots." I almost quit again until I looked up a strategy. I would always get shot down and forced to fight these bullet sponges on foot. That wouldn't work because a horde of guards would spawn around me and cattle prod me to death every time. What worked, which was completely unintuitive and you're not trained to do, is to get under the bot and blast it. This causes the guard AI to bug out and not be complete assholes and the bot can't touch you. Once I read this strat I did the mission on my first try. I won't mentioned the number of times I failed this mission until I learned how to exploit the bad AI.

Overall, this is a tough game to recommend. It has some great moments, but they are heavily diluted in a sea of bullshit and jank. I'm on the fence about completing the trilogy and leaning towards not bothering. They didn't fix any of the issues with the first game and added guns with narrow corridors which are incongruent with the camera and bad controls. Numerous times my camera would get locked on geometry resulting in me getting killed by enemies. Having a radar (which you have in the city) would have dramatically helped with this issue on missions. Also I didn't learned about a key ability, which would have significantly lowered the difficulty of the game, until the last boss fight... firing your gun while spinning in the air. Do this every time more than 1 enemy is around. You'll thank me. You send out massive AOE damage which seems to compensate for your inability to aim with the piss poor controls.

The last thing I will state is praise (since I did very little of that) for the changes to the city as the game progresses.