A fan of Jak and Daxter or Burnout will thoroughly enjoy this game.
For a racing game, there's quite a lot of plot in it. It's goes very deep to show you all the things that go on in kras city from the time of arrival to when you finally win your antidote. In one of the developer interviews, i think they said that they had over 45 minutes of cut-scenes, which is a whole lot for a racing game. So don't be put down by this game if your a fan of the Jak and Daxter series. It's still got all the depth and intrigue it had before.
The game starts off great, lulling you in slowly with a good tutorial, and some early solid races. The controls for the cars seem to be spot on. Very responsive. The weapon controls are a lot easier to master than those of Twisted Metal. Although they don't have as much variety. Still the actual racing is really good for the standards of the people who brought you Crash Team Racing.
The levels you can race on are really well thought out, and have a great deal of variety in them. Are can race in the futuristic J&D city environments, to the ancient temples of the precursors. There's also Haven city, Spargus and the Marauders base of operations. Each place having many different tracks within. Plus all of them just seem to co-inside with each other. Like they're all supposed to be where they are. Which is not something you see very often in racing games. The earlier tracks are easy to maneuver, throwing in a few difficult races here and there. Obviously, as you progress in the game, the tracks get harder. But they get steadily harder. It's not just like BAM! and your pulling out your hair. Although these later tracks can be hard, you still get to race on the easier, earlier courses.
The cars on the other hand are just as numerous and very well detailed. They range from big honking clumps of metal, to the smaller and more sleek. There's the usual tuning of the cars. You can upgrade the speed, acceleration, armor and turbo. They're all pretty obvious in their functions, except the turbo. During your races, your going to be holding down the turbo button a lot, and i mean a lot. The turbo feature basically ups your efficiency. Like at the beginning of the game, if you got a turbo pick-up, you'd be able to turbo for maybe 3-4 seconds. But once you upgrade your car, you can turbo for approximately 7-8 seconds. But one of the main drawbacks of the cars can't really be but into stats. It's more of a feel kind of thing. Like when you in the final yellow eco cup, the class 1 cars seem to do better than the class 3 cars. Of course that might be just me.
Now the race types in this game are probably more than in any other. You can do standard circuit races, races where the sole purpose to destroy these drone cars, death matches in open fields, artifact races, capture the flag type things, races to charge up the most power cells first, to kill the most number of beasts or machine, races to hit these freeze tokens and core the lowest time and races the you just run head on into on-coming drone cars. There's about 9 there, and i think i missed a couple. There are some races that you can only do with other human players, like assassin. But each one of these races has there own challenges and require different strategies and tactics. Even different types of cars.
Jak X in a nutshell. Variety. Solid plot and game play. Awesome game all around.