General Overview

A typical outing into Just Cause 2 will have you deliberately flying off cliffs with motorcycles, opening up your parachute, zipping down to another vehicle with your grappling hook, and doing it all over again. The sheer amount of craziness and mayhem you can enact with this title is enough to get any action aficionado’s blood pumping and the best part is the fun never stops.

Available For: PC (reviewed), PS3, Xbox 360
Developer(s): Avalanche Studios
Publisher(s): Eidos Interactive
Release Date: 2010
Rating: Mature
Archetype(s): Action, Adventure

Full Article

I can’t imagine why you would need anymore than just the general overview to make you want to buy the game, but…okay. The basic backstory to this game is your mentor and supervisor from the last game has, at least the government suspects, gone rogue. You travel to Panau where once again another lesser known nation is in plots to go against America and also track down said agent to get the full story.

That said, dismiss everything I just said and listen to my version of the story. Antonio Banderas gets a magical grappling hook and parachute and decide to terrorize a small Asian country by blowing anything in his path the fuck up. He also can’t die. Nope. He simply regenerates at the last checkpoint should things go South. As a result, he’s allowed, presumably by viking gods, to continue to traverse this mortal plane and deliver punishment to those that would dare go against Murrica.

This game is hilarious, fun, and crazy as hell. There are so many things you can mess around with, especially with the addition of the most updated Havok engine. One thing I like to do is mess around with the tether function. See, in the last one, you could use your grappling hook to reel yourself in while your parachute was open, but that’s about it. This time around, there are all kinds of crazy things you can do like zip yourself around the battlefield, pull enemies around, tether two things together, whip enemies with the grappling hook, and much more.

Tethering is something that doesn’t sound that fun at first, but consider the following. So there are slim propane cylinders that, when shot, fly around in random directions until they explode. If you tie two of them together, they look like a demonic nunchuk that eventually explode and will probably cause other things to explode as well. But what’s really fun is tying an enemy to one, shooting the cylinder, and see him fly around in random directions screaming until it explodes at which point he’ll fly off in a random direction and more than likely die from the fall.

It’s obvious that Avalanche knew we were going to dick around with this concept and added in achievements such as pinata (beat tied up enemies to death), juggling (send enemies airborne and kill them with a hail of bullets), follow me (tether enemies to the back of your car and send them on a drag trip to hell), and wrecking ball (kill enemies with something tethered to the back of your car).

But even if we’re not talking about parachute/grappling hook craziness, there’s more mayhem to be had in just destroying shit. Just Cause 2 allows you to shoot up all kinds of things like radar dishes, gas stations, dictator statues, propaganda trailers, SAM sites, water towers, and much more. Naturally this attracts enemy attention, but that’s also part of the fun.

Especially on stronghold takeover missions, I’ve compared this game to that of Contra. It’s run and gun mayhem at its finest and never takes itself too seriously. The characters are pretty decent too and the story isn’t half bad, though it’s basically B movie quality stuff. Still, for Just Cause 2, that just plain works. Nevermind that absolutely everything has been improved ten fold over the original from the graphics to the music to the environments…and that’s really saying something because I was also immediately addicted to the original as well.

So is there anyone this game WOULDN’T appeal to? I’d have to say that really the only people who can’t enjoy this type of game are people who simply don’t want to have fun. The controls work, the camera works, the game is insane and thoroughly enjoyable, there’s plenty to do, and blowing up shit has never been so much fun. This game also has an insanely low price and is well worth every penny.

Buy it here!