As a spin-off the patently popular Jak and Daxter franchise on PS2, sidekick Daxter not only gets his own game but his own system in Daxter for the PSP.

Though it's your typical platform-hopping, berry-picking, baddie-bopping, boss-bashing action/adventure game at heart, it's also distinctively stylish and properly polished -- something that can't (yet) be said of any other PSP game in this genre.

Daxter is a bug exterminator extraordinaire who wields a mean swatter and even more effective sprayer/fogger (/jet pack, eventually) thingy. Good thing, too, as there are relentless hordes of bugs in need of swatting/spraying/fogging (/roasting too, eventually) along side some platforms to hop, vehicles to drive, puzzles to solve, swings to be swung and bosses to bash through a decently divergent array of levels and comical storytelling throughout (riffing hilarious on game and movie spoofs along with the trademark quippage from the orange-dude-with-the-attitude himself).

On top of accomplished technical merits like great camera work, nuanced character animation, sizeable and sagacious level design and intuitive control (even though it's familiar platforming fair with cliff climbing aplenty and many lope from ledge to ledge, hits and misses are based on player deftness, not seemingly-blind luck), Daxter is in the upper echelon visually, too -- by portable standards, at least --, which is a further impressive achievement when you consider the load times suffered for such graphical detailing is practically nil (read: well hidden), a feat very few PSP games -- in this genre or otherwise -- can claim.

So though Daxter doesn't break any ground with game type, it does prove that the PSP can now stand alone as a game system worth owning for at least one exclusive, top-notch game (there are a few, actually) that can't be played on anything else.