Just Cause 2

Avalanche Studios has crafted an amazing chaos sandbox within the Southeast Asian island of Panau. As Rico Rodriguez you are tasked to perform missions for three different factions and to cause Chaos, which functions as your currency for unlocking new Agency missions (the main quest) and black market weapons and vehicles. You can use your radio to call down the black market supplier where you can purchase items like tiny jets, hoverboats, quad rocket launchers, and a parachute with a skull on it. The cities, villages, and military bases in the world are littered with vehicle and weapon parts that you can use to upgrade your black market death machines. Each area has a number of things to collect and destroy that contribute to a percent complete for that area – collect enough weapons parts and money caches, destroy enough water towers and gas tanks and you’ll 100% the area. There are dozens upon dozens of these areas with hundreds of things to collect and blow up; everything from gas stations and radio towers to statues of the glorious leader Baby Panay are destructible, and everything blows up real nice.

The best part of Just Cause 2 beyond blowing shit up is traversing the huge open island nation. There are dozens of unique vehicles ranging from puttering mopeds to fighter jets and pretty much everything in between. There are boats too, like tiny fishing sampans and military boats with machine guns on them. My favorite method of travel, and perhaps the most useful, is Rico’s hookshot… er, grappling hook. You can fire at almost anything and draw yourself right to it, making scaling the city skyscrapers a breeze. In a car chase, you can move into stunt position, a brilliant carry-over from the first Just Cause, and use your hook to jump from car to car. Or, you can use the tether function to tie a car to a nearby tree or telephone pole and watch as the driver is thrown off course. Or you can shoot it at a man in a guard tower and bring him down to ground level. You can even use the hook to fling yourself along the terrain and hit the endless parachutes button midflight to shoot yourself upward – I traveled most of the gameworld using this method and it was a blast.

All the destruction and chaos and freedom come together to make an experience that unfortunately becomes stale and repetitive due to the game’s generic mission structure. You spend a majority of the game going on faction missions for one of Panau’s three main groups: the Roaches, the Reapers, and the Ular Boys. Each faction has a funny caricature of a leader who dispenses missions, most of which are (shockingly) to blow things up, with the occasional hacking minigame and kidnapping mission thrown in for good measure. A lot of these missions are copy and paste however and far too similar. It’s rare that a mission’s objectives change or become more dire as you play, which is a damn shame because when they do it’s amazing – in one mission I was tasked with blowing up the satellites on top of rockets that were about to launch. After catapulting myself around the huge Panauan space center, I blew up all three satellites only to find there was another rocket nearby that was about to launch. So, I had to commandeer a fighter jet to blow up the rocket mid-flight. It was a simple bump in the road that added to the urgency of the mission and made the experience more satisfying.

Just Cause 2 is a lot like Grand Theft Auto in that its chaotic mechanics tie in well with the story it’s trying to tell about international politics, dictatorships, and oil. Rico is pleasantly snarky and bleak about the whole ordeal, which is funny considering he’s the one blowing up gas stations and water towers for the benefit of Panau. The side characters like Sheldon, your pig-grilling United States contact, and the faction leaders who all have amazing pet names for you (and crazy accents) help fill out the satire. The game is mostly about blowing shit up and it’s a satisfying experience that would’ve been made great by an overhaul in mission structure. I found myself using an Xbox 360 controller for vehicles and a mouse+keyboard for on foot running and gunning – my standard for open-world games at this point. There’s definitely a lot to like, but I didn’t feel compelled to 100% the game – it seems like a ludicrous endeavor considering the amount of stuff in the game. I did have several moments of obsessively completing some bases and cities by finding all the nooks and crannies they hide items, and bringing down the giant cranes at the shipyards as always amazingly satisfying. Not only is this a fun game to play, but it’s a great way to blow off some steam by bringing down an evil dictator one fat-faced statue at a time.