Naughty Dog used to be famous for being the creators of Crash Bandicoot on the PSOne. At the time, Crash was a groundbreaking and innovative platform game featuring awesome graphics, fiendish level designs and incredibly addictive gameplay. Not ones to rest on their laurels, Naughty Dog are now famous for being the creators of Jak & Daxter, a game to which all of the above praise applies and much more.

Jak and Daxter are a couple of inseparable friends living in Sandover Village, built on a picturesque and idyllic coastline. However, as teenagers will do, the boys disobey the words of the wise Green Sage and go exploring on the dangerous Misty Island. Here they discover two villains up to no good who are setting up raids on nearby villages. Confronted by a guard, Jak attacks the guard but Daxter is knocked into a pool of Dark Eco in the process. Dark Eco being chaos itself in liquid form, when Daxter is spat out of the pool he's gone through a slight change. He's now some kind of meerkat type rodent and is pretty upset about it! Seeking the Green Sage's help, Jak and Daxter are told that the only way to change Daxter back is to visit another mage far in the North. However, none of the Mage's portals are working and there's a lava canyon blocking the root on foot. The Sage's daughter, Keira, has built a flyer that might just get Jak across the canyon so he can activate the portal in the next village, but it's going to need 20 power cells to fuel it. And so the adventure begins.

The main action is free-roaming platform navigation and exploration, but there are hidden items and puzzles to solve everywhere. The main aim of the game is to collect precursor power cells, which Keira needs to fuel her plane to get you from one village to the next, in order to activate the portals and be able to reach the mage in the North. However, there are all manner of obstacles that stand between you and the power cells, which are highly prized possessions.

Your tasks begin at Geyser Rock, which is a quick tutorial level to get you going. It explains what everything is and how to use your moves - you can double jump, spin attack, charge attack and dive bomb, the latter of which is used for smashing the scout fly crates. There are also four types of eco (other than the dark eco) that are used on your quest. Green eco can be found everywhere and is your source of energy, blue eco increases your speed and allows you to activate precursor technology, yellow eco allows you to blast out a volley of fireballs and red eco enhances your strength and the power of your attacks. The blue eco is particularly cool as some of the technology it activates is ingenious, but I'll come onto that shortly. However, the effects of all but the green eco only last for a few seconds, so you must often be very quick to make the most of them.

There are three ways to get power cells - buy them, complete objectives and collect scout files. There are a number of precursor orbs on every level (usually at least 100) and whilst the bulk of them are out in the open, some are very sneakily hidden. They can be anywhere - in boxes, underwater, high up in the air or hidden beneath objects and it's your job to find them as these are what is used to buy power cells from the characters you meet. There are also 7 scout flies on every level that Keira sent ahead to look for power cells. However, your enemies have captured them and locked them in boxes, so you must find and release them. The last of the 7 always has a power cell.

By far the most fun part of the game is the many quests, mini-games and feats that are needed to win, find, beg or steal the majority of the power supplies. Never before had there been a platform game as clever, inventive and fun as J&D (still only surpassed by R&C). The range of things to do is just fantastic. Many of the characters you meet will give you a power cell in return for completing a task. The old birdwatcher lady wants you to push a giant Flut Flut egg off a cliff, the sculptor dude wants you to catch his muse (an evasive little ferret type animal that you must chase around Misty Island and is possibly one of the hardest tasks in the game!), the mayor wants you to reactivate the town's precursor power source and the sleepy farmer wants you to herd his Yakows back into their pen!

The tasks you must complete are always a lot of fun to do. Apart from helping people out, some involve negotiating a series of obstacle-ridden platforms to reach a power cell at the end whilst others are quirkier. On Sentinel Beach, Daxter decides he wants you to run through a flock of resting seagulls! Do this three times and they fly away from the beach, inadvertently causing an avalanche as they pass a crumbling cliff top, from which a power cell falls. In the Forbidden Jungle you must line up a series of lenses to direct a beam of precursor power through them and back to Sandover Village. You must also climb to the top of a massive tower and once up there you are taken into the precursor temple in the jungle. This is where you first really experience the precursor technology. Blue eco vents fully charge you with super speed and you can activate floating platforms, jump pads that launch you about 100 feet into the air and a fallen bridge that gets you to the temple's entrance. There is also a nasty huge plant to defeat, which is trickier than it looks. The plant's vines where sticking out of the ground all over the jungle, attacking you as you passed them. However, once the plant is dead, the vines die too. There are so many great touches like this throughout the game.

There are a number of challenges and mini-games to be faced as well on your travels. One of the first you will come across is catching fish for the crazy fisherman in your village. You simply use left and right to move the net back and forth across the screen, catching good fish and avoiding the poisonous eels (catch even one of those and all the fish is ruined). It's a fun little challenge and a nice change of pace - also the fisherman is happy afterwards, he laughs more heartily than Long John Silver when he's watching World's Dumbest Pirates! There are several levels connecting different lands too, where you fly Keira's A-Grav Flyer across treacherous terrain. In the lava canyons you must collect water balloons to keep the flyer's temperature down or it'll explode - there are still crates to smash, and scout flies, orbs and power cells to collect on the way though, so don't think these levels will be a pushover. You also get to ride the giant Flut Flut chick later in the game, which is tricky to control but again makes a nice change.

There is one level, the Precursor Basin, entirely carried out on a floating jet bike. Tasks on this level include a time trial through a trap-laden obstacle course, speeding through a series of rings, which you must pass through before they fade away (yep, it's J&D that invented this now-popular platform game feature), directing big moles into their holes and curing dark eco infected plants. There are other times where you get on a flyer of some sort and each one features cool objectives, tough to reach orbs and is a lot of fun, with the flyers being fast but very responsive to your control.

The later levels become more and more imaginative (and even more challenging) too - the Boggy Swamp, the magnificent underwater Lost Precursor City, which is jam-packed with nifty technology based puzzles and tricky platform sections, the dark and spooky Spider Caves and the slippery Snowy Mountain. Each level is so original and different to the last, with a new range of tasks to complete that aren't copying the previous ones, that you will love this game to the end and never get bored of the action.

Even by current standards (and considering that J&D is now over 18 months old), this is one of the most vibrant, rich and colourful games around. Every level is jam-packed with smooth, detailed, lush and sumptuous graphics to feast your eyes upon. Everything from the characters and close-up details to the spectacle of sweeping views, beautiful skies and distant horizon lines looks wonderful. Also, there are a large number of very distinctive and different looking environments to play through, each of which bring completely new sights. The world Jak and Daxter live in has a very unique and stylish look to it. The subtitle of the game is "The Precursor Legacy" and the advanced technology of the mysterious precursors, an ancient race so old that not even the rocks and plants can remember them, features some of the most impressive architecture and creative designs I've ever seen.

Jak & Daxter has a great story and a great sense of humour too. Never has there been such a brilliant collection of oddball characters together in one game before! The characters are all exaggerated stereotypes, including the Jak's eccentric uncle, the sleepy farmer, the potty old birdwatcher, the sculpting dude and the fat, nervous mayor. And these are just the people you meet in your own village! The rest of the game is full of classic and highly amusing characters. The enemies all look great too, with a huge assortment of aggressive wildlife and the hired goons of our aforementioned villains. The animation is some of the smoothest I've seen, which leads me onto Daxter.

Although he doesn't help you in any way, Daxter is one of the funniest game characters ever invented. He perches on your shoulders and hangs on for dear life when you do your spin attack. When you're hanging from a ledge, he'll leap onto it and attempt to help pull you up! When you die, the last thing you see is Daxter's face looking over your fallen body, with some kind of wisecrack to make. But best of all are the power cell animations. Every time you get a power cell it is celebrated in style (a clever way of not breaking up the action whilst saving the game). Daxter is just hilarious; he moonwalks, he does robot dancing, he pirouettes and breakdances all over the place, he plays air guitar, flexes his puny muscles and sometimes he'll slam dunk the power cell into Jak's backpack like a basketball! There are over ten different animations, they never get boring and always raise a laugh.

The amazing and accomplished graphics and animation are backed up by fantastic sound effects and music. The range of sound effects for crate smashing, punching, the crackle of blue eco energy, the alien sounds coming from the precursor technology, the noises the baddies make; they all really complete the experience. The voice acting is consistently excellent and over-the-top, perfectly fitting the exaggerated appearances and stereotypes of the characters, with Daxter being particularly brilliant. The music is also outstanding with a great range of catchy tunes that aren't even slightly annoying (as platform game music can often be) and they range from the feel-good relaxing tunes of the beach and village, to the tense and spooky music of the jungle and caves, to the exciting themes of the lava canyons.

I have no criticisms to raise against Jak & Daxter. Sure, there are some damn tricky levels where you might fall to your death quite a lot, but it's only due to a lack of skill on your part and the last continue point is never far away. Persevere and you'll make it long before you being to tear your hair out. Also, although Haven harped on about no loading times a lot, J&D did this first too. Because the whole series of islands are connected via the flyer levels there are no loading times as you travel from one place to the next. All the loading is done behind the scenes, which is a real accomplishment.

Jak & Daxter is one of an elite group of games that have been created and developed with such loving care and attention that it shines through in every respect. With some of the best graphics, sounds and music you'll come across on any PS2 games, varied, challenging and addictive gameplay, a great sense of humour and larger than life characters, Jak & Daxter remains one of the very best games (let alone platform games) that you can buy and is an essential purchase for everyone. This is gaming at its purest and I defy you not to fall in love with it as I have.

Reviewed by Geoff Holland for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).