Box Art

I came into this title with no expectations, I’m generally not a fan of sandbox games due to their generally repetitive mission types, and their lack of story. I had played the original Just Cause but was not at all impressed, but the demo proved to me that they had fixed a lot of what I thought was terrible about the original and so because of that and because all of the media convinced me that I could spend a lot of time just screwing around doing cool stunts, and that sort of thing appeals to me as a gamer so I picked this up. Kudos to the marketing team on this one, they’ve won.

At this point I’d normally start by giving a brief synopsis of the story coming into the game, but I’m not going to bother with that here because, well, they didn’t… they give you enough of a background so that you know why Rico has been sent to Panau, and why you must help the 3 terrorist factions that inhabit the area. There are a couple twists that are at the bare minimum of any story told in the veil of espionage, but they are poorly set up and poorly delivered. Campy dialog is on full display here. Rico did make me laugh with a couple of his one liners, but through the bulk of the game you are treated with poorly executed, bad dialog, with terrible accents. Even understanding that to some degree its supposed to be this way, it didn’t really have the charm of a “B” movie that it was supposed to. On top of that, there was no real progression to the story. You are basically told to keep doing what you’re doing every time you complete a mission. Because of this you have no sense of loyalty to any of the characters, or any of the factions.

Now that all that is out of the way; This game looks good! some of the scenescapes you run into as your traveling around are incredible, some very convincing sunsets over open water, or mountains, etc, are very well done. The explosions look and sound great. The animation in the cutscenes weren’t great but I’m suggesting to skip them all anyway, its a waste of time.  The map itself is huge, and each of the little locations scattered through out it are unique despite sharing many assets with other areas they are constructed in such a way that 1 airport looks very different from another airport. This level of detail really stands out to me in games of this ilk, as you may remember my gripe about it in my Assassin’s Creed 2 review.

There is a lack of variety in the mission types you run into in this game, you’ve got your standard fare, hijacking, assassinations, race and pick up this parcel type missions. On top of that there are ‘stronghold’ missions where you an 5-6 useless AI goons try to raid a military base to take it over, I’m not sure I’ve had this experience in a sandbox game before, but they were sort of fun. Truth be told however, I spent most of my 19 hours with this game not doing missions at all… simply finding a new location and destroying all of the government property, and finding all the collectibles. The good news is that this behavior was encouraged, and did count towards your chaos meter, which progresses the story. Speaking of locations, and collectibles… there is an insane amount of them in this game. Literally hundreds of locations, and Literally thousands of collectibles, and the game make sure you know as you do them how little of a chunk of the game you’ve actually seen. In fact when you complete the story line, you are entered into mercenary mode, and it tells you in percent terms how far along the game you are… when I finished the story, I was at 24%. I think its safe to say that there are less story bits elements in this game than there are airports on panau… but there is a lot of stuff you can still do once you’re done. I truly feel sorry for anyone with OCD who inadvertently picked up this game… if I were to hazard a guess, I’d say you could easily spend 100 hours collecting stuff in this game, or trying to find that 1 last vehicle you need drive final achievement/trophy…

You’ll also spend a lot of time traveling from one mission to the next. Once you get to used to traveling with the parachute/grappling hook, it’s generally speaking the fastest way to get around when travelling short to mid distances. For longer trips you’ll likely want a plane which are made conveniently available in the black market shop for a reasonable fee. You can basically tell your dealer to drop in one of each type of vehicle, from airplane to tanks to four wheelers once you’ve filled the chaos meter enough to unlock them, along with any sort of ammo you may need. Your weapons and vehicles can both be upgraded using the weapon and vehicle part collectibles that are scattered around, they can be used for things like improving top speed and acceleration, or accuracy and magazine size. Its not a great or rewarding system, but it does give you some choice as to how to upgrade your hero. If travelling is not for you, the black market dealer also offers an extraction service which is effectively a teleport, but when I was playing it was just as fun to summon a jet and fly there myself. If you’re not going to enjoy the world they’ve provided you with, this game probably isn’t for you.

AAAAHHH!!

The controls felt good and intuitive most of the time, although navigating while in the stunt position sometimes felt clumsy. For example, I would be riding in vehicle that had a rear mounted turret, in order to get back to that turret you’d need to move to the ‘stunt jump’ position, and then push back to get into the turret, and similar back into the drivers seat. It’s cool that they give you that sort of control, especially why the vehicle was in motion, but in high speed situations it often just felt too long to get back to the gun and back to the drivers seat. I had similar experiences when grappling onto a helicopter. There is all sorts of fun to be had with your grappling hook though, like sticking bad guys to a jet thats about to take off, or strapping yourself to a tank and rocketing yourself to safety (don’t forget to jump off before it explodes!).

Action hero in action!

Before I give my final thoughts on this game as a whole I want to share this one event that will basically lead into those thoughts. I recall this one mission where I had several military jeeps chasing me, while I was on a long stretch of road… I hopped onto the roof, quickly shot out the front tires on a couple of the followers, one of which swerved into the 3rd creating a huge “hollywood action sequence”-esque explosion, at which time I hopped back into the car and drove off into the sunset. You don’t get moments like that in many games, particularly when you have so much control over the experience, and although they are rare because they’re fairly difficult to pull off intentionally, when it happens the game give you the sense that you are an action hero and you just pulled off something crazy. I could have just as easily tried to get away by driving, but I would have missed out on that satisfying ending. I absolutely have to commend Avalanche Studios, for creating a huge, beautiful, fun to explore sandbox for adventurers to play in, and giving players the ability to resolve the situations at hand in a way that matches their style of play. But if you are a player that just sort moves from checkpoint to checkpoint, then you’re probably not going to get the most out of this game. If on the other hand you can spend hours just roaming around looking for trouble, it should be hard for you to pass on this, just don’t expect the story to drive your experience.