Just Cause 2 Video Game Review
I’ll tell ya, nicking an army chopper, using it to lay waste to the base you swiped it from, fleeing enemy air support, then bailing out at 5 hundred feet to parachute into the jungle and make good your escape just never gets old. But such epic stuff only scratches the proverbial surface of the cornucopia of tropical violence and snow-covered mayhem that’s Just Cause 2.
Like its precursor, JC2 follows the black-ops exploits of Rico Rodriguez, ass-kicker extraordinaire, as he plies his trade in the fictional South Pacific country of Panau. The small country is ruled by a unbearable tyrant and — okay, let’s just hang on a second here. I would like to take a second and say how friggin’ outstanding JC2’s graphics are. I mean, I never harp on graphics, but if I were to ever meet Megan Fox in reality, I would absolutely let her know that she is as stunningly good-looking as JC2…and I would be lying, because if JC2 was a girl, she would make Megan Fox seem like a tore-up hood rat. Depth of field, viewable distance, complicated textures, sense of motion, water effects, assortment of topography ; absolutely everything in the way this game looks makes a contribution to a sense of being in the game world, rather than just watching it go by on your television screen.
Therefore JC2 is a’sandbox’ action-adventure game in the style of the Grand theft auto series. After a short tutorial segment, you are dropped near one of Panau’s little cities and left to your own dark devices. You can choose to join up with one of the island’s separatist cliques, which’ll give you access to side missions ( regularly concerning nifty set-pieces like an assault on a nuclear reactor ), you can target the main story ( an intrigue concerning the disappearance of Rico’s former mentor ), or you can just wile out and cause amazement among the citizens. Whatever you opt to do, you will absolutely, certainly, need to blow shit up. JC2’s most crucial resource is’chaos,’ caused, mostly, by destroying stuff the regime owns : fuel stations and radio towers, SAM sites, and radar stations, nearly anything marked with the Panauan’star’ can be annihilated to contribute to your chaos score. Scoring more chaos points unlocks missions in the primary story ( and the side stories ), as well as unlocking new weapons, cars, and other power-ups from the black market with which you can better cause chaos, and the cycle continues. Integrating free-flowing annihilation into the game play model was a stroke of brilliance, but what truly sets JC2 apart from other sandboxers is its commitment to causing you to feel free to mess around with the world sans consequences. It achieves this not only by throwing more than a hundred different vehicles ( including boats and a frickin’ flyable Boeing 737 ) at you, not only by making the game world wonderfully variegated ( from high, snowy mountains to tropical jungles to Dakar-rally-esque deserts ), but essentially with a couple of small, imperative details : Rico’s grappling hook and parachute.
Just Cause 2 is available for Computer
The grappling hook can stick to any surface inside 100 meters of Rico, and will instantly yank him towards what it hooks onto ( including automobiles ) at a high rate of speed. And you can employ the parachute straight away at the press of a button, anytime Rico is even a foot or 2 off the ground. The combination of these two things gives Rico speed and freedom of movement that only Batman routinely gets to experience, and it makes the sector of Panau straightforward ( and so incredibly fun ) to explore. Unlike in GTA, where you’re often encircled at floor level, or in Infamous, where the topography is just about identical thoughout Rico’s grapnel-chute combo enables him to scale large skyscrapers, glide wistfully from mountaintop to brook bottom, and even hook one thing to another thing ( try grappling bad guys to moving automobiles for particularly funny results ). The end-product is an experimental playground where’hey, I wonder if this will work’ really frickin’ does.
Yeah, the writing and voice acting are not that good ( although Swedish developer avalanche Interactive tries its damndest to be funny, God bless their icy Scandinavian hearts ), and the tale kinda doesn’t make sense, but who cares when the gameplay is this legit? This game is so well designed that time after time in my playthrough I thought,’Man, would it not be great if this game had X?’ and then, lo and behold, X appears , like the albatross to the ancient Mariner, except in a completely good way that doesn’t cause the mass suffering and death of my shipmates. Honestly, i can’t think of any reason why anyone that loves computer games will not enjoy JC2. Learn it. Adore it. Live it.
