Just Cause 2

If there's one thing you're going to hear from me over the course of this review, it will be just how flat out crazy Just Cause 2 is. It makes no admissions to the contrary either. Just Cause 2 just might be the most bizarre and the most entertaining gaming experience you'll have this year, if you're willing to look past a few of its shortcomings. 
 
Just Cause 2, like the original, has you as Rico Rodriguez, a CIA agent who specializes in overthrowing Governments. His mission is the fictional South-Asian country of Panau, a beautiful place covered in beaches, dense jungles, and high peaks. At its core, Just Cause 2 is a wide-open sand box game, allowing you to travel all across the map at your personal leisure with occasional checkpoints scattered across the map to progress the story. But where Just Cause 2 differs from other titles in this broad, increasingly seen genre, lies in just exactly how you can travel from point A to point B. 
 
I mean, sure, I guess you can grab a vehicle. That would be the more CONVENTIONAL method of travelling between destinations, right? But part of the charm of the franchise is instead of using that formula which has already been used to death anyway, Swedish developer Avalanche Studios has instead entrusted our main protagonist with a bat-shit crazy grapple hook used to zip your way across the terrain. By combining this useful action with what seems to be an infinite parachute, Rico can basically launch his way across the map without ever having to touch the ground. This mechanic is highly intuitive and major props must be given to Avalanche Studios for not only making the technique a lot of fun, but by basically perfecting it into a delicate art. Just Cause 2 just wouldn't be the same game without this crazy addition. Cars and other vehicles are also useful in this game, but since the grapple hook and parachute combo is so effective, you'll likely choose to avoid them.
 

 Lets get to more crazy, shall we? The grapple hook may be at its most effective by letting you launch across the world, but it also serves a purpose to show just how comically ridiculous the game is. Say you're parachuting through the world and you see a car you want to hijack. Fire your grappling hook at the car and reel in, you have a new set of wheels. Is a pesky guard shooting at you with no abandon? Fire that sucker at him and pull him towards you so you can melee him to death. Even more devious (and even more crazy) could be connecting said guard to perhaps the back of a moving jeep and watching him get yanked away into submission. You can perform all these actions quite easily with a bit of mastery of the controls.
 
All that sounds great, but there's a flaw to Just Cause 2's game. Namely, performing all these actions can be tad complex, especially in the early stages. I won't make any qualms about it, getting to an appropriate level of enjoyment by mastering the controls took me some time. To compound this problem, Just Cause 2 basically says 'fuck you' to tutorials since they literally shove you out of a helicopter into an enemy infested base where everyone starts shooting at you for kicks because that one guard did it first and it probably looked like a lot of fun. And since the controls are kind of super complicated at the early stages (until you hit that point where you're like, "OH, that's how you do it"), it can be an unrelenting lesson of masochism to even keep playing the game.  But once you do hit that point where it all comes together, the mechanics feel solid.
 
For the more casual explorer, the enemies can sometimes be an exercise in frustration. I love being able to explore, but when that option is hindered by the trigger-itchy bad guys that populate the map in spades, one slight infraction, even of the smallest variety, can send a firing squad to your position. Since the militias can easily overpower you if you're not careful, simply trying to get the game's full enjoyment in the early stages can get frustrating.  
 
All far as the visuals go, they're absolutely gorgeous. With no load times anywhere across the country, it's quite a sight to go from a dark and cold snowy mountainside resort to a dense and vibrant jungle setting with little towns and obscure nooks and crannies in between. The music, though relatively plain, does a fairly good job of emitting a certain level of chaos as Rico goes about his business. Most spectacularly for both of the senses, are the many explosions you'll directly create over the course of the game. They're simply a treat to see, with a pretty solid physics engine to go with it, as you watch debris fly across the screen.
     
As far as open world games go, Just Cause 2 is by far the most exciting and crazy of them all.  The chinks in the armor come mostly due to the complexity of the title and the bizarre cut scenes that interlude the chapters. In the end, these minor short comings don't really break the title, but it does give the developer things to improve before the unveiling of the next chapter. With the fantastic hook shot ability and given the strides Just Cause 2 has taken over the original, I say the outlook is looking sharp for any future iterations..