We've seen Daxter a few times already - first at E3 2005 and then at the Consumer Electronics Show last January. Both early showings impressed us quite a bit. And it wasn't just the quality of the visuals, though it's clearly a pretty game. It's the fact that Ready at Dawn managed to squeeze a complex game, in terms of mechanics and design, into a UMD without making many sacrifices. Play a level from Daxter, any level really, and it's pretty clear they've managed to pull off an impressive feat.

Easily the most impressive thing about the game, at least initially, has to be the game's visual presentation. The quality of animation is as good as anything we've seen on consoles and, truthfully, it's better than most. This is true of normal gameplay, but also of the animated cutscenes, which the team rendered using the game's 3D engine. Furthermore, some of the shared environments between Daxter and Jak II, such as the sweeping cityscapes, share identical geometry and textures. So certain scenes don't just look like their PS2 counterparts, they actually are - very nice. Fans of the series will be happy to know all voice talent returns for every major character and the game packs 32 minutes of cutscenes penned by the same author as previous games.

Now, since we've seen Daxter before and have written on it, we're going to stick with what's new, except for a brief recap which we'll get into right now. The game takes place between Jak and Daxter, and Jak II. We play as the sidekick Daxter, who takes a part-time gig as a pest exterminator. He does this for two reasons - it'll give him some coin, for one, but it also strokes his ego. Fans already know Daxter (who looks somewhat like a weasel) is the most obnoxious, cocky sidekick in the history of videogames, so that's very fitting. Lastly, he takes the job to help him rescue Jak, who finds himself imprisoned at the beginning of the game.

Daxter plays much more like the first game in the series, Jak and Daxter, than Jak II or Jak X: Combat Racing. This is because developers wanted to make a traditional platformer instead of a game that tried to mix too many genres while mastering none. As such, we spent most of our time with Daxter avoiding obstacles, exploring vast environments and killing bugs. Daxter has a lot of "platforming without platforms" as the developers like to put it, because much of the action revolves around hovering. Yes, hovering. Daxter can use his pesticide gun to levitate throughout the environments in short, 10-second spurts.

Hovering is a skill in desperate need of mastering should anyone want to reach the end of the game. In one of the levels we saw, which takes place late in the game, we had to maneuver through a fish cannery by floating between giant blocks of ice. And they weren't stationary, either. They were actually moving on tracks, so our timing couldn't be off by much. Remember, there's only 10-seconds of juice (read: float action) before our pesticide guns need a refill, so it's easy to get stranded mid-air without practice. In addition to navigating a field of frozen fish, we also had to take our pesticide guns (modified with a flame attachment) and melt our way through icy corridors and tunnels. It's a very detailed stage - we could hear ice cracking throughout and see an icy mist permeating almost every room.