Game Reviews

There are plenty of games that attempt to make you feel like the star of your own action movie, but few have done it with as uproariously fun results as Just Cause 2. Or with explosions as big and as frequent for that matter.

Take this scene for example, typical of what to regularly expect from Just Cause 2; you're hurtling through dense jungle on the back of a motorcycle headed for a despotic government installation a few hundred miles away, when you spot a passenger plane soaring up over your head. You stand upright on the motorcycle, surf-board style, and open your parachute, catapulting you towards the plane. Within reaching distance of your arm-mounted grappling gun, you reel yourself into the plane and hijack it in mid-air. After a few minutes taking in the sights thousands of miles below, you spot the enemy base, set the plane on a collision course with the installation's fuel tankers and bail out just in time to see the whole place explode and crumble as you parachute to safety.

It's all in a day's work for the game's hero Rico Rodriguez, and all possible within a few minutes of picking up the controller in Just Cause 2.

There's a loose and ridiculous story holding all this together. Agency Special Agent Rico Rodriguez is out to find his old mentor, Tom Sheldon, who has gone rogue somewhere within the fictional South-East Asian archipelago or Panau. Rival gangs vie for power in Panau, and Rico will have to play each group off of each other to get to his mysterious mentor.

It's all very tongue in cheek and more an excuse for a string of set pieces than any intricate tale of intrigue. Voice acting can be excruciatingly clichéd (sometimes bordering on racial stereotypes), though in the context of the ludicrous action surrounding it, it all sort of works, in a straight-to-video sort of way.But there is nothing straight-to-video about the scale of Just Cause 2. Panau encompasses some 400 square miles to be freely explored, with terrain ranging from expansive deserts to lagoons and icy mountains. While up close it's graphically rather average, take to the skies in Just Cause 2 and you'll see what the detail has been compromised for; there is an absolutely breathtaking draw distance, with the island stretching as far as the eye can see. It makes base jumping a really exhilarating experience as the ground miles below you rushes into focus.