Daxter was released in the USA in March. So that means there’s been loads of reviews of it already and if you take a gander at the Internet you can see that it rarely scores less than 80 per cent. (We looked at metacritics.com because they used to quote us when we still had our old website.) But, yeah – rarely under 80 per cent. The thing is – people suck. It’s true. Look at the pop charts, look at the game charts, look at who wins what in whatever award show happens to be on ITV. And repeat with us: "People suck."

It’s like people have forgotten how to judge. Like their brains are clouded. They’re impressed by shiny things. They’re easily distracted. They’re force-fed on a diet of rubbish television and inconsequential football. They actually like listening to James Blunt. "But he’s a good singer." Hmm, shush, you suck. "You’re beautiful..." Not now James, we’re busy.

So while everyone is sucking, we’re playing Daxter and sighing. Sighing at the "Collect 40 Gems" levels. Sighing at all the things we’ve been doing in 3D platformers since Mario 64, crying for release from the double-jump, the bits where you slide down slopes on your arse, the… sod it – just all the things we’ve grown to dislike about marsupial-starring platform games that remind us of Vexx. Especially those bits where you’re jumping from platform to platform, getting higher and higher, until you mess up and fall for miles, and have to jump from platform to platform all the way back up again. God that sucks.

Daxter’s levels are linear, in fact the whole game is pretty much set on one path. You start at the beginning of a level and work your way to the end collecting the required number of gems, collecting orbs, collecting potions, collecting bugs and collecting other indiscriminate icons that we really weren’t interested in finding out about. You see something floating, sort of bobbing about, shining in the near distance and you collect it. Flick some switches to open a route and more things to collect appear when the draw-distance kicks in and decides you’re close enough to see it. We sighed a bit more when looking about in the Free View and things appear and disappear depending on where you look. And then on certain sections you’re not allowed to use the Free View or twirl the camera with the shoulder buttons. Damn, didn’t we go and jump the wrong way hoping for a platform to land on… then climbed all the way back up to jump off in a different wrong direction.

Repetition sets in very quickly even though you’re jumping from platform to platform in very different looking levels. It doesn’t take long to tire of the collecting and constant bugwhacking, then just as you’re feeling massive relief from getting the hell out of the last boring level, you’re hit with massive slow-down when the hub level tries to load. Slow-down is rubbish; it really grates when you’re trying to move to the next gem-infused level and you can’t get there for ages. (Maybe it’s a mixed blessing… it’s not though.)

Another thing that annoyed us was the dream-sequence mini-game. Collect (Christon- a-bike!) enough orbs and you can go and have a wee lie down, whereupon Daxter dreams he’s in various films: he can be Neo from The Matrix fighting off clones, he can be Gimli from Lord Of The Rings beating off orcs storming a castle’s walls, he can be William Wallace in Braveheart throwing rocks at invading English troops. You can push buttons and directions when the enemies run over the icons and get a bit frustrated at the length of the games and hackneyed spoofery going on. "Freedom!" shouts Daxter after he completes one and his maximum health rises.

Fine, we’ll give Daxter this: it’s pretty. And the music is good, quite dramatic and it adds something to the atmosphere while the gems pile up. But even then, we know what nice things look like, we’ve seen pretty things before. We’ve heard good music, lots of good music. None of that matters a jot when you’re using Daxter’s bug spray to hover like you used FLUDD in Super Mario Sunshine. Or when you double jump and activate your spin attack, which incidentally you can’t cancel into your ground attacks, leaving you open to get hit by an enemy.

We’re not bucking the trend just to appear edgy and cool, don’t even think that. We’re not cool. Heck we suck just as much as everyone (especially at games) but what we can do is be the voice of reason, point out the bad things and not get caught up in whimsical gushing about yet another derivative platform game. We’re way above that.

Tim Empey