Imagine the pre-credits sequence of any James Bond film. Imagine playing it in a game; every last-second dive from a falling car, every lazy parachute gliding away from an explosion, everything that made the first five minutes of James Bond movies awesome, all done by button presses that you made happen. That’s Just Cause 2, all the time.

Can someone make a mod for the game that enables the James Bond theme to play when you press a button please? That would be nice, cheers.

Tags: Just Cause 2, PC

Sandbox games usually have a problem – they tend to need to appear realistic and grounded, and yet they also need to enable the player to go over the top and be excessive. A dichotomy, if you will (checks dictionary.com; that’ll do). Grand Theft Auto 4 leaned heavily towards realism; if you wanted to go across the map without getting into another tedious shooting match, you needed to drive there and respect the traffic around you. I believe the original Mafia went this way too, but took it even further – the cars were 50s models, so they were slow as fuck, and being caught speeding was a recipe for disaster. Speeding! WTF LOL etc.

These games inherently let you go over the top though. In GTA4, you can easily acquire an AK-47 and a rocket launcher, get on the roof of an office building downtown, and pick off bystanders until the SWAT teams and helicopters come looking for you. Half the thrill is seeing how long you can last until you need to get the fuck out of there and heal your wounds, but when you do need to leave in a hurry, the game uses realistic methods to stop you. If you steal a car, then the police further up the road will put spikes on the road to burst your tires. This escalates the difficulty and the tension even further – just how far can you go in a car with two tires, or even none? The answer is usually not very far, not with SWAT team vans in hot pursuit anyway, but it’s a thrill. Eventually though, it gets depressing – you know you’re not going to live long. The game always wins eventually.

The other type of sandbox games throw realism off the side of a clown car, run it over, and drive into the sunset cackling. Saints Row 2 would have you run around in a pimp suit slapping hookers while a TV crew were filming a Cops style reality TV show. Or something like that. I’ve only ever played it a few times, and although the comedy stylings were sometimes proper funny, they distracted from the tasks at hand. For me, anyways. I’m probably not their target market.

But Saints Row 2 had the same problem as Grand Theft Auto 4 (among others). It was too hard to get away from the law. You could only do so much, and then the game decided enough was enough – it would spoil your fun.

And now for Just Cause 2. Playing it on medium or hard difficulty settings gives it the same difficulty as the others. You can cause shit, but you won’t last long. The difference here, though, is that Just Cause 2 gives you tools to escape at any time; your character has a grappling hook and a parachute at his disposal constantly. These things are glorious. The grappling hook can pull enemies from rooftops or guard towers, or used up close as a melee weapon. The parachute (parachutes really, they’re just infinite) can be deployed whenever you get off the ground, and can help you get out of trouble. Grappling across the ground while using the parachute lets you pull yourself away to safety, or lets you swing yourself higher and higher so you can drift for longer distances. The essential point is that in other sandbox games, you get into trouble, and then it’s up to you to hunt for a decent way out of it (like a car or a helicopter or something). In Just Cause 2, the two best methods for escaping are always on the pad. Two buttons. Press one, then the other. You are now safe.

But. But! It’s frustrating. Medium and hard make the enemies crack shots. Doesn’t take much to kill you. You’ve got about fifteen seconds since firing your first shot before you are swamped. And then you parachute away at the very last second, and your health is fucked, and you have to find a health kit, and when you do an enemy sees you, and it starts again… Frustrating. You’ve got a fucking mental grappling hook! You’ve got infinite parachutes! You’re the agent in Crackdown, but with even more badassery! This is not how an agent rolls. Agents kick fuck out of people and walk away slowly whilst looking pimp. Agents walk away slowly from fucking massive explosions going on behind them, also whilst looking pimp.

So you do the unthinkable, and you stick the game on the easy difficulty. And with one button press, the entire game becomes what it arguably always should have been. You can still die at the hands of your cursed enemies, but it’ll take them that little bit longer. No more repeated hit and runs to completely destroy an enemy settlement; you’re fucking badass. You can walk through that place with the biggest chain gun you ever saw, mowing down soldiers as you go. You can run around chucking grenades at everything you see, and you know you’ve got a good five minutes before you have to run for cover. Hell, you can even stick triggered explosives on anything that’ll explode, and casually mosey out of town as you detonate everything else on screen.

That’s why I’ve been a big pussy and put it on easy. That’s why I’m still playing it. That’s why it’s my favourite game for at least this week. No frustration. Just fun.

Tags: Just Cause 2, PC

In between doing all sorts of daft shit in World of Warcraft, I’ve finally managed to get stuck into Just Cause 2.

Just Cause 2 is a game in which the following things are guaranteed to happen (and not necessarily in this order):

• You see a car go past, and with one button press your character leaps magnificently from the road to the bonnet of the car, which lets you shoot at your pursuers whilst moving away from them at speed.
• An ememy soldier is shooting at you, whilst stood next to a gas canister. You tie the soldier to the gas canister, put a bullet in the canister, and giggle as the canister rockets into the air with the hapless soldier in tow.
• Whilst systematically demolishing an army barracks, an enemy helicopter is sent to shoot you down. You grappling hook your way to the underside of the helicopter, flip onto the front of the windscreen (whilst shooting the gunner on the side of the ‘copter), smash the pilot’s face into the dashboard, throw him out, get behind the controls (all this while the ‘copter is still moving forwards), and then use the ‘copter’s guns to finish demolishing the barracks.
• You’re driving a car, and there are enemy jeeps following you. In those jeeps are gunners, hanging out the sides and shooting at you.  You need to stop the jeeps without slowing down. You jump out of your car and land on the roof of your car, which is still driving in the direction it was pointed at, and at the same speed. You use your grappling hook to tie one of the jeeps to the road. It follows for a short while until the grappling hook rope goes taut, and the jeep gets tugged backwards. The other jeep that was following ploughs straight into the side of the first jeep, and falls off the cliff on the other side of the road. You climb back into your (still speeding) car and drive away.
• You’re at one end of the game world, on a long empty beach. You want to go to the other side of the world to see what is there. You call your mate up, who owns a really big helicopter, and buy a little jet off him. He delivers it to you, right there on the beach in front of you. You get in the jet and use the long stretch of beach as a runway and fly to the other side of the world, parachuting down to your next target.
• You’re at one side of a massive mountain, and your target is on the other side. You jump into the air and get your parachute out, and use your grappling hook to pull yourself forwards whilst using the parachute to gain altitude. You repeat this all the way up the side of a miles-tall mountain until you cross the peak, and leisurely float down to your target.
• You are on an oil rig in the middle of the sea. Whilst trying to detonate the bastard, the game keeps spawning tons of enemy soldiers, who shoot you. You use your grappling hook to tie all the soldiers to the side of the oil rig, where they just hang around looking grumpy. No more soldiers; you then proceed to blow the oil rig up.
• You’ve arrived at a new enemy military installation, but this one has a runway about half a mile away from you. On that runway is a jet fighter, which is about to take off to turn around and blow you the fuck up. You need to stop this. Solution – fire your grappling hook at the jet just as it’s thrusters kick in. Grapple your way to the cockpit, whilst it is taking off, and throw the pilot out. Get in the cockpit, turn the plane round, and blow the fuck out of the installation.
• You are attacking yet another enemy installation, and you realise you are bored of attacking enemy installations. This installation is on the side of a mountain. In front of you is a big troop carrier truck. You get in the truck, aim for the side of the mountain, and floor it. As you go over the side, the camera zooms out and shows the truck hurtling to impending death below. You get previously unknown “stunt points” for doing this, and as you think “ooh I’m doing that again!”, you realise the ground (which was previously miles away) is now hurtling towards the truck you are in. You quickly jump out the side of the truck and deploy your parachute, casually drifting away from the massive explosion that occurs behind you.

I’ve been trying to think of a game which this is similar to, and the only one I can think of is Crackdown on the Xbox 360. You get the same feeling of freedom, the same ability to propel your character across the map at ridiculous speeds, and the same ability to blow the fuck out of everything at any given moment. Just Cause 2 has more though. More of everything. It’s a game that gives you tons of toys to play with (and pretty much straight away, too), it demands you experiment with them, and it recognises when you do something creative or clever. It’s a game which looks nothing like a toybox, but that’s exactly what it is. And it is fucking huge too, so you can always go exploring when you get bored.

Recommendation – A few reviews recommended that the game should be played on “easy” to get the most out of it. Having tried it on medium, I definitely agree.

Tags: Just Cause 2, PC