Ok, this game has been out long enough to qualify for a full review or even a bargain bin review, but between Red Dead Redemption, Borderlands and my semi-annual OCD replay of ancient Resident Evil games, I’ve only just got round to this, so a 30 Minute Playtest it is. In fact, it’s tempting to refer to it as a 20 minute playtest, as the sheer immensity of the game map is such that I blew ten minutes of review time just driving around the island chain of Panau.
With over a third of the test time taken up by just one activity you’d be forgiven for thinking that there can’t have been enough other activities for me to have assessed the game, so to set your mind at rest, here’s what I did in the other twenty minutes: Harpooned a soldier to a jet plane which I then hijacked and crashed into a casino; rammed a jeep full of soldiers off a motorway flyover; grappling hooked my way aboard a flying helicopter which I used to wipe out an army base; bought and crashed three £30,000 micro-jets in the space of two minutes and, in an actof shocking cross-cultural callousness, wiped a Buddhist temple off the map using a mini-gun. Best of all, only one of those was part of a scripted sequence as opposed to something the game granted me the freedom to do during open play. Seriously, this is a game that encourages you to think like a Hollywood stunt director with an unlimited budget, a game in which the chase sequences look and feel like you’ve taken control of a Bond movie, a game which starts with the entire map open to you and swiftly lets you begin buying military hardware and experimental aircraft. Just Cause 2 is the very definition of instant and explosive gratification.
Readers of Bojeeva’s recent articles about the worrying easiness of modern games will no doubt find much comfort in Just Cause 2 as well. The difficulty here is perfectly balanced-squads of soldiers can take you out if you’re not extremely mobile, cars can quickly be machine-gunned into an exploding fireball and believe me, your first three or four jet flights will end in disaster just moments after take off. Nothing in the game is completely effortless, but none of it is ever difficult enough to get you frustrated either.
For all the glorious scale, gorgeous scenery and exhilarating freedom of the game, however, there are few drawbacks as well. The fast travel system only works on location you’ve already visited, meaning that you’ll spend a staggering amount of time just trogging around the map-as we’ve already said, a third of our playtime was taken up by travelling. Worse still, of the missions I carried out in the other twenty minutes of test time, no fewer than three of them were essentially identical, a trend which, if it continues, could suck a lot of the joy out of the game.
Finally, there’s the voice acting. The Asian characters in Just Cause 2 speak in a sing-song gabble of missing consonants and breathy tail-offs. Seriously, it feels like only a matter of time before one of them offers me “Egg flied lice, fi dollah”. It’s only the fact that the game’s American, Swedish and Hispanic characters are afflicted with equally poor dialogue and dodgy voice acting that makes you realise the Just Cause’s voice direction is just rubbish and not actually racist. Even so, Just Cause 2 is a game that provokes a shamefaced urge to turn the volume down whenever there’s anyone else in the room.
These mild complaints, combined with some even smaller ones (the long winded process of buying equipment, the wacky vehicle physics that causes sports cars and motorbikes to hump the road like motorised sex-limpets while saloon cars and jeeps handle like turbo-charged clown cars etc) take a lot of the shine off the initial exhilaration. This is a game that instantly establishes its five star potential, and just as swiftly undermines it. Nevertheless, any game where a rocket launcher, microlight and powerboat are never more than a button push away has a lot to recommend it.
Verdict after half an hour: Don’t bother going for 100%, but it’s definitely worth your time.