Fifteen years since the last game in the Jak and Daxter franchise released, and I’m still on the hunt for a title that made me feel the way the original trilogy. High-octane action with shooting,  platforming, collecting and many a shenanigan to get into, my child brain was rewired. Captivated. All these years later and nothing has come close, but Akimbot, a freshly released indie is here to try and remind you how damn good the PlayStation 2 action platformers were. I mean, man, weren’t they great? Can’t we go back to a time like that?

Wrapping up my roughly ten hours with it, it mostly recaptures that feeling, but all the warts from its inspiration remain. With all that’s said and done, at least I could never accuse the game of not being faithful.

Akimbot is set in a futuristic sci-fi universe with a robot race and not a human in sight. Controlling the droid Exe, your journey starts with a daring prison escape with a reluctant drone named Shipset in tow. What begins as a sprint from authority across a beach soon sees the pair tripping and stumbling into an intergalactic war, filled with time travel and exploration of many a weird planet and landscapes. At the heart of this great conflict and adventure lies a great artefact that warring sides are after.

The hook with Akimbot is that it isn’t just emulating Jak and Daxter but also your beloved Ratchet and Clank titles. The game toes the line between the both well. Namely, its gunplay and movement feeling is fantastic. Your arsenal isn’t as fancy as those found in other franchises, with a minigun, sniper rifle, assault rifle and rocket launcher being what’s doled out to you across the game’s seventeen chapters — no flashy gimmicks to any of them. You do get one of four bonus special weapons that are offered to you at a shop though; entailing weapons such as ultra-powerful akimbo laser pistols or a laser beam that can be fired continuously. Exploding robot bodies everywhere, you’ll dodge, jump and brawl your way through waves of enemies.

This all feels really good. The mid-air dodge that’ll help you both avoid hectic gunfire and clear larger platforming gaps is satisfying every time you pull it off, seeing Exe do a little torpedo with his slender frame milliseconds after you’ve overcharged a gun. Combine this with sweeping melee attacks, and even wall-running and grappling hook sequences (all good games should have the two) and suddenly you’re playing quite the fluid platformer. I’m not going to lie to you and pretend it’s the level of flashiness and gameplay satisfaction of modern Ratchet and Clank games, but it’s joyous nonetheless.

Akimbot does a wonderful job of pulling you into sequences that feel ripped from the games it takes inspiration from. Dogfights in space will have you engaging in arcadey flight amongst the stars with lasers just passing by your head. A pair of scenes that emulate Street Fighter where suddenly everything is pixel art. A late gameplay moment in the game has you running towards the camera away from an assailant a la Crash fleeing the boulder in the original Crash Bandicoot. A few sequences see you controlling a dune buggy equipped with a machine gun across a sandy desert. Jak III, eat your heart out. These often feel quite cinematic, serving as explosive and tense scenarios backed with incredibly gorgeous lighting for a game of this scope. Walking across celestial battlefields with explosions erupting all around you, the sheen of Exe looks ridiculously good. The same can be said for how ethereal mines are lit and populated by alien faunas, acid lakes and the like. Developer Evil Raptor didn’t need to go this hard, but they did.

Most egregious is the performance of Akimbot: it isn’t optimised. Not buggy, just unoptimised. Playing on my PC with Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-10700F CPU @ 2.90GHz 2.90 GHz processing and 16 GB of RAM with the game stored on an SSD, Akimbot was susceptible to regular slowdowns, screen tearing and the like. There were moments when this game would randomly decide to just crawl. Lowering graphical settings wouldn’t fix the error either, only hard resets. Moments like this absolutely sucked the joy out of the game.

I could spend a lot of time talking about the things I wanted Akimbot to be better at. Collectibles are boring tiny data entries that aren’t all that worth it, so much so they leave you perplexed at their very inclusion. The game goes on the teensiest bit too long. I digress. What does matter most is that damn it, they got the heart right.

Akimbot’s high-octane action, especially the gunplay, is rarely dull and platforming sequences that see you chaining wall runs and grapples between hooks are a blast. The world is as bright and colourful as it needs to be and though you don’t get too much opportunity to learn about the game’s world and its depth in cutscenes and exploration, it’s fun to simply live in.

You too will grow to quite like the pair that is Exe and Shipset. Humour has always been a tough thing to get right in games, with many not pulling it off well at all. Akimbot manages to pull it off just enough. Your drone companion will start off sounding like a whiny likeness of Borderlands‘ Claptrap but before long the two are cracking jokes together that can’t help but at least get a snicker out of you.

I love these moments. Sometimes it’s a simple commentary on how Exe keeps picking up items but we have no idea where on his person he stores them. Other times it’s Shipset picking up a data sequel and being disgusted that it’s only 5g in strength. Maybe it’s even just the pair audibly despising they’re being sent on another side quest. It’s little factors like this that certainly make Akimbot more than the sum of its parts.