Jak X - Combat Racing

A will reading is an odd place to start a racing game. Krew, the bloated crime boss from Jak II, has one last joke to play from beyond the grave: everyone gathered to hear his final wishes is served poisoned wine, and the antidote is held hostage to a season of races in Kras City. It is a contrivance, and Naughty Dog knows it, but it gives the whole thing a clock and a reason for Jak to be behind a wheel rather than on a rooftop.

The driving comes straight out of Jak 3's desert vehicles, tightened into something with real weight. Cars slide long, and the game rewards you for it — drifts and airtime feed a turbo meter that you spend in bursts, so the fast line is rarely the clean one. Weapons arrive as coloured eco pickups sorted by direction of fire rather than by tier, which means a front-loaded arsenal is worthless when the pack is chewing at your bumper. Learning to hold a rear-facing charge for the last lap is the skill the game is actually teaching.

Event variety carries the campaign further than the handling alone would. Circuit races sit alongside Death Races that only end when the field is destroyed, artifact hunts, freeze rallies against the clock, and arena deathmatches with no finish line at all. Some of these are better than others; the pure combat arenas thin out quickly, while the timed dashes hold up. Progression through the championship unlocks parts and paint, and the difficulty spikes late in a way that feels calibrated for players who had already put a hundred hours into the trilogy.

It looked and sounded like a deliberate hard turn. The hard rock score, courtesy of Billy Howerdel and Larry Hopkins, pushes the whole production toward something louder and more adolescent than Jak's platforming roots, and the character models carry the same faintly embarrassed edge that Jak II introduced. Six-player online support was ambitious for a PS2 title in 2005 and is now a closed door, which leaves split-screen and the campaign as the surviving game.

What remains is a competent, generous combat racer that never quite escapes the comparison it invited. Naughty Dog left the series here and moved on, and Jak X reads now as a studio testing whether its physics work and its cast could carry a genre nobody expected of them. The answer was mostly yes, which is not the same as necessary.