Reviews// Just Cause 2

You can also do vehicle stunts, which involve jumping onto the roof of your car and fooling around up there so you don't get shot. You can drop to any of the vehicle's sides to dodge the flying lead. The problem is that you're always at least a little bit aware that if you're on the roof, there's probably no-one driving your car, so it can be a little bit impractical to start fannying about up top most of the time.

All the vaunted 'verticality' of the game doesn't feel like it brings that much excitement to the table, either. Yes, you can base jump. Yes, you can free fall. Yes, you can latch on to helicopters with your grapple to hijack them, even as your own is dropping like a fiery bag of turd. But, while it's fun, there's only so much opportunity to do all that, and there's not a lot we haven't seen elsewhere in some form or another. GTA IV offers helicopters. Spider-Man games and more recent offerings such as [PROTOTYPE] and inFamous have had us leaping off tall buildings. Parachuting is just like gliding in either of the last two games. Free falling is really just falling. We might not have seen all that vertical guff in this exact configuration before, but we have seen it.

That's not to say that the grapple and the parachute aren't fun – they are. They're just not the big deal Eidos would like you to think – they throw some variation into the combat, but they're not much more exciting than that. The grapple, in particular, feels a bit more like a gimmicky add-on to the game's third-person shooter mechanics aimed at giving Just Cause 2 a unique selling point than it does a real game changer.

So that's the action of Just Cause 2. Unfortunately, the structure holding it together can be a little bit vexing, too. Things start out at a nice pace. You're dropped on top of a mountain, you take out an enemy base and retrieve some intel, then you go off looking for a contact on the island and do some fooling around on a tall casino. That's all well and good and eases you in to the game mechanics reasonably well, but then the mission structure opens up.

In a nutshell, you're on Panau to complete agency missions – the ones that further the plot. To open up agency missions you have to build up 'chaos'. Broadly, this is achieved by doing things that will help destabilise the government. More specifically this involves completing missions for local criminal factions and blowing government shit up.

So the missions you would normally consider secondary or side missions actually end up becoming necessary to your progression. Not in the sense that you won't get enough XP or cool stuff to help you out later on - in the sense that you won't actually get to 'later on' if you don't do them. You won't have to complete every last one, but you'll need to do a good chunk of them.

This leads to a feeling that the narrative's a bit rudderless. Where other sandbox games typically have some thread or device leading you through the narrative, progression in Just Cause 2 often feels like the random selection of missions from a menu.

More annoyingly, you need to build up enough chaos to get on with the faction missions, too. While you normally have enough chaos built up from the last mission you did to unlock the next one, at one point I found myself with no missions open to me and ended up having to grind, wandering aimlessly around the map looking for government property to blow up. It's how I imagine shit anarchists feel a lot of the time.

And, 'chaos'? What is that? I mean, I know what chaos is, but I really don't know how blowing up just enough buildings makes some criminal faction mysteriously know that now is the right time to employ you to hijack a convoy.