The car physics are too stiff and steering is too sensitive. You’ll also quickly discover that traveling by parachute is faster and easier than traveling by most vehicles since their handling is subpar. Open-world games are notoriously buggy, but in Just Cause 2 those buggy moments are some of the most rewarding. Watching a car flip hundreds of feet into the air for no reason is damn fun even if it does mean that the physics are a bit messed up. The hook and parachute mechanics are nearly flawless, particularly because even at their most broken, they’ll still surprise you in the best ways. The parachute can be combined with the hook to propel you across the landscape at high speeds, or it can be used on its own to glide gently to earth. The hook can be used to swing on, attach to, pull toward, tie to, hang from, and swing onto just about anything or anyone.
They’re the peanut butter and jelly of Just Cause 2 and make the perfect bullet-riddled afternoon snack. Grounding the entire experience is the pairing of the grappling hook and parachute. Yet for all its obvious influences, Just Cause 2 feels unique, and its many disparate elements fit seamlessly together. The penchant for destruction is lifted from the Red Faction: Guerilla playbook. The open-ended base attacks play out like those in Crackdown. The political setting is similar to that of Mercenaries. The parachute and grappling hook resemble the web traversal of Spider-Man 2. The tiered mission structure is borrowed from Saints Row. The faction gameplay is borrowed from GTA: San Andreas. In designing Just Cause 2, Avalanche Studios carefully hand-picked the best ideas and mechanics from a wide array of seminal open-world titles. The whys and wherefores become clearer as the game progresses, but it quickly becomes obvious that each faction is backed by a first-world nation-each with its own interest in seeing the nation destabilized. And the Reapers are the radical ideologues fomenting revolution from Panau’s mountain caves and remote peaks.īorrowing its plot from Dashiell Hammett’s frequently adapted novel Red Harvest, your job is to cause as much chaos as possible by ingratiating yourself with each of the three factions and setting them against one another in order to bring about the collapse of the island nation and bring down its corrupt dictator. The Ular Boys are the cultural nationalists fighting on behalf of the rural populace and their traditional ways. The Roaches are the corrupt capitalist shipping magnates operating in the nation’s scattered cities. The three factions of the fictional Southeast Asian island nation of Panau present a shorthand version of the most fundamental political conflicts of the third world. It’s part Rambo and part Postcolonial Studies 101. In titles like Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, Assassin’s Creed, and Far Cry 2, competing factions are divided by region as well as by socioeconomics and ideology.Īs much as Just Cause 2 is all about big dumb fun and big explosions, it’s also surprisingly astute in how it describes the politics and geography of the third world. Even though it sounds like the subject of an interminably boring college lecture course, political geography is the “special sauce” that makes good open-world games tick.
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