I'll tell ya, stealing a military helicopter, using it to lay waste to the base you swiped it from, fleeing enemy air support, then bailing out at 500 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 is Just Cause 2.
Depth of field, viewable distance, complex textures, sense of motion, water effects, variety of topography; absolutely everything in the way this game looks contributes to a sense of being in the game world, rather than merely watching it go by on your TV screen.
So, JC2 is a "sandbox" action-adventure game in the style of the Grand Theft Auto series. After a short tutorial segment, you're dropped near one of Panau's small towns and left to your own dark devices. You can choose to join up with one of the island's separatist factions, which'll give you access to side missions (often involving nifty set-pieces like an assault on a nuclear reactor), you can focus on the main story (an intrigue concerning the disappearance of Rico's former mentor), or you can just wile out and cause consternation among the populace. Whatever you choose to do, you will absolutely, positively, need to blow shit up. JC2's most important resource is "chaos," caused, mostly, by destroying stuff that the government owns: fuel stations and radio towers, SAM sites, and radar stations -- just about anything marked with the Panauan "star" can be destroyed to add to your chaos score. Scoring more chaos points unlocks missions in the main story (and the side stories), as well as unlocking new weapons, vehicles, and other power-ups from the black market with which you can more effectively cause chaos, and the cycle continues.
Integrating free-flowing destruction into the gameplay model was a stroke of genius, but what really sets JC2 apart from other sandboxers is its commitment to making you feel free to play around with the world sans consequences. It accomplishes 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 primarily with a couple of small, critical details: Rico's grappling hook and parachute.
The grappling hook can attach to any surface within 100 meters of Rico, and will automatically yank him towards what it hooks onto (including vehicles) at a high rate of speed. And you can deploy the parachute instantly at the press of a button, anytime Rico is even a foot or two off the ground. The combination of these two things gives Rico speed and freedom of movement that only Batman normally gets to experience, and it makes the world of Panau easy (and therefore tremendously fun) to explore. Unlike in Grand Theft Auto, where you're often trapped at ground level, or in Infamous, where the topography is pretty much identical throughout, Rico's grapnel-chute combo allows him to scale huge skyscrapers, glide wistfully from mountaintop to river bottom, and even hook one thing to another thing (try grappling bad guys to moving vehicles for particularly hilarious results). The end-product is an experimental playground where "hey, I wonder if this will work" actually does.
Yeah, the writing and voice acting aren't that good (although Swedish developer Avalanche Interactive tries its hard to be funny, God bless their Scandinavian hearts), and the story kinda doesn't make sense -- but who in the world cares? Honestly, I can't think of any reason why anyone who loves video games won't enjoy JC2. Learn it. Love it. Live it.Thanks to 1up
