Just Cause 2

Just Cause 2 Multiplayer

For anybody unfamiliar with Just Cause 2 here is a brief summary. You are Agency operative Rico Rodriguez and have been dispatched to the wondrous (albeit mythical) isle of Panau in order to overthrow the reigning dictator Pandak “Baby” Panay using a wide variety of weapons and vehicles but mainly blowing shit up and using your grappling hook to break the laws of physics along with your instantly respawning parachute. Okay? Good.

Suffice to the say when the game came out in 2010 it was pretty well received but it lacked any form of multiplayer or online experience. 3 years later and one small team of passionate develops later and now you can terrorise the island of Panau with thousands of other players, or you can just run them over with a neon pink bus…

Good Stuff

This game was a lot of fun just playing on your own, when you add a server of hundreds of people to that mix it’s 100% unbridled chaos. Each server hosts a different style of the mod, at it’s base level the multiplayer mod features a system where kills earn you cash and cash buys you weapons, vehicles and player skins. In addition to straight up murdering fools for cold hard cash you can also participate in events that take place all over the, quite frankly, gargantuan map such as races and demolition derbys. Not every server is the same however, some will force the charge for weapons and such whereas others will have the store completely free, some will have god mode and others will have the ability to alter the mass of your vehicles. All of this alone is enough to make this mod great, but its true greatness comes from the players. There’s no doubt that this game is best played with a friend because it allows you to wreak havoc upon other players and each other, a personal favourite between my friends and I is throwing buses at each other at high speeds using the overly hilarious “boost” feature which is activated when shift is pressed and dramatically increases your speed to ridiculous levels (even allowing boats to fly across the map).

It’s not all about harassing though, it’s the random events that people create that drive the fun in this game. Starting a convoy of trucks and driving up a mountain to a ski-resort sounds like something you would find in Euro Truck Simulator but when it involves 10+ people all talking to each other in chat and occasionally hurling cars at each other on the way it stops feeling like a server with blank names and starts feeling like a community having fun which tends to be lacking in multiplayer experiences as of late. The norm tends to be people informing you that they have slept with your mother several times.

Bad stuff

This game has a huge map full of diverse and interesting locales and in the singleplayer it’s also vastly populated, in multiplayer however there are no npcs to come after you when you blow up a power plant, no civilians to hang from trees. I can’t really complain about this too much because the fact that the mod exists as it does is a great thing. I’m no modder and can only imagine how hard these guys worked to create this mod so I can’t hold something like this against them especially as the mod is somewhat in its infancy in terms of large scale play.

So…

There are some things I would love to see make an appearance as I said, NPCs would be a huge addition that would really have an impact on the way the multiplayer works and could lead to some great in game events like overthrowing a military base. Also if I could grapple other players to stuff that would be fantastic. Besides those two very minor things that are 100% personal I can’t really fault it, this is a fantastic mod that has breathed life into a game most people had forgotten about and hell if it leads to Just Cause 3 with a multiplayer like this built in I will be bloody ecstatic.

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Image courtesy of JC-MP.com

Mod can be found either on steam or at http://www.jc-mp.com/