If you're anything like me you downloaded the Just Cause 2 demo and played the tantalisingly short taster that gave you a glimpse into the crazy fun to be had on the fantasy island of Panau. You probably ran out and bought Just Cause 2 in its first week of release expecting fun, adventure and really wild times. Unfortunately you may also have discovered that the mathematics of 30 minutes of awesome multiplied by 6 doesn't necessarily equal three hours of awesome. Just Cause 2 makes the same fatal flaw that Mercenaries 2 does, it gives you lots of cool things to do but utterly fails to engage you when it comes down to the actual story and progressing the game when you're bored of stunts and explosions. Yes, you will eventually get bored of the cool stunts and awesome maneuvers CIA strong man Rico can pull off and find that the rest of the game is lacking in more than a few important places, It's almost the Michael Bay movie of games.

The tethering ability turns any combination of aircraft and vehicle into a jet powered wrecking ball

Things start off promising enough. You are Rico Rodriguez, CIA agent, and you are in a helicopter getting your mission briefing on the Island of Panau, seems (insert evil dictator description) named Baby Panay has taken over the country and killed his dad, there's also a CIA agent who seems to have gone missing who you need to 'retire', who's also your former mentor. So it's "topple the dictator then cap your father figure", got it. Anti-aircraft fire starts going off and the guy carrying your PDA with all your mission data gets hit by shrapnel and falls out of the chopper. You need to sky dive after him and grab the PDA, then pop open one of your never ending supply of parachutes and paraglide into the enemy base to complete a basic tutorial mission.

Your first few hours of gameplay are definitely fun as you get a feel for the controls and learn how to drag bad guys to their death with the grapple hook and use the hook and parachute together to slingshot your way around. Most of the game will be spent using your wrist mounted grapple hook to zip around the place. It's also extremely useful for hijacking vehicles, just aim fire and you're hanging off the offending vehicle, needing only to shoot the passengers and pummel the driver or pilot to take it over. The parachute controls are a little tricky at first to get used to but when you're familiar with them moving around the island gets a lot easier. There are plenty of vehicles to make use of but sailing around with your parachute is much more convenient. The controls for both Rico and vehicles are smooth and well executed and the explosions, of which you will see a lot, never fail to entertain. Especially the larger destructive sequences when you destroy missile silos and gas mains by overloading their systems.

Might want to steer a bit left of the flaming fuel silos there Rico

Initially Just Cause 2 is a lot of fun. As you explore your first few locations and blow the hell out of stuff and try out your stunt abilities you will enjoy yourself and basically recreate the thrills and spills of the demo. Using the zip rope thing to get around is enjoyable and hijacking aircraft, then flying the aircraft into other enemies while ejecting and parachuting to safety is definitely a laugh. You can leap from one exploding helicopter and hijack the helicopter that just blew you up, you can destroy landmarks by tethering them to an armoured car and hitting the gas, and you can upset American's by hijacking jumbo jets and crashing them into skyscrapers.

Leaping from place to place and experimenting with the open world setting is enjoyable in the short term, but eventually you'll get bored and want to actually progress into the story and the various faction campaigns and this is when things start to fall to bits for Just Cause 2. To progress the game you need to earn Chaos points, to earn chaos points you need to get out there and fudge things up for the Panay military by destroying enemy bases and blowing the hell out of things. Very similar to earning notoriety in games like Red Faction: Guerrilla.  Earning enough Chaos unlocks faction and CIA missions, most of these faction and CIA missions involve destroying enemy bases and blowing the hell out of things. Are you begginning to see the problem here? Things get a little too over done and tiresome a little too damn quickly. Your warning bells will start ringing when you complete the first mission for each of the three factions. Despite the fact the three factions are different organisations, a crime syndicate, a rebel army and a religous extremist group, the first mission for each is identical. Get dropped outside a base, escort five other soldiers and an engineer to the communications hub in the base and capture it. Each one plays out identically and I suspect they even used the same voice recordings for the dialogue the engineer uses.

Rico is a make believe professional for whom the laws of physics do not apply, please do not try and hijack flying helicopters in your own home

Then there's the issue of inconsistency. In Mercenaries 2, which Just Cause 2 shares a lot of features and problems with, you can destroy everything in the open world, if its a building you can level that sucker with the proper application of various air strikes, similarly in Red Faciotn: Guerrilla if its a built structure it can be destroyed. In Just Cause 2 some things are fair game and some things just aren't. A few bursts of fire from your machine gun causes giant steel radio towers to buckle and collapse and reinforced anti aircraft SAM sites to explode in flowers of flame and debris. But civilian buildings are complettely impervious. The caveat here is that you can, and are only meant to, destroy structures with the government of Panau logo on them. But the barrack buildings that enemy soldiers endlessly pour from are equally indestructible, even if you fly a jumbo jet with C4 stuck all over the nose into them, trust me I've tried and yes it was a heck of a lot of fun. It gives you the feeling of an open world sandbox game with the safety on and puts a slight damper on your thirst for destruction.

Are you with RAC?

The neverending spawning of enemy soldiers makes the game far more difficult than it should be as well. Not that I'm complaining about challenging games, I love a challenge in the right dose. But Just Cause 2 doesn't feel challenging, it feels damn underhanded at times. As mentioned, during missions and base assaults required to unlock missions you have to contend with endlessly spawning bad guys. Added to this is that its hard to tell when someone is actually dead, enemies who collapse to he ground have a habit of getting up and shooting you in the back. Added to this again is the fact that ammo is in short supply at the best of times and enemies don't drop that much on even Normal difficulty so you are constantly back tracking for crates and dropped weapons, or getting away from the action to call in the black market dealer. All of which really disrupts the flow of gameplay and if you die, the very poorly placed checkpoints usually means it's right back to the start of the mission for you buddy. Here's a tangent gripe to throw on the pile as well; ordering items from the Black Market dealer is a huge pain in the ass. You order weapons, vehicles and quick trips to previously explored locations from the dealer; all essential stuff to complete your goals in the game. To order something from the dealer you need to select your mobile phone, find a flat piece of ground, wait for the loading, skip a cut scene, wait for the loading, order only one single blasted item, wait for the loading, then pick it up. Just to be clear, if you want to order two new side arms, a new rifle and some new grendaes for a mission, plus a good car to get there, not an unreasonable expectation for most, if not all, the missions you tackle, you're going to have to go through that whole process no less than five times. It's just painful, plus if you die you need to reorder all that stuff.

Of course you can improve your health and armour levels to improve your chances. Every location on the island, and there are a lot of locations, from villages to temples, amry bases, harbours and so on, is riddled with secret crates that improve health, armour, and can be used to upgrade your weapons and vehicles. When you get close to these you'll get a flashing grey arrow pointing towards it to help you find them. Let me just say that again, to improve your chances of succeeding at missions and level up your character from weakling pussy boy to death bringing bullet sponge you need to find hidden packages. It's a mechanic that probably looked good on paper but in execution it's just plain annoying. Hidden packages are a rewarding deviation from regular play in open world games, they should never be the crux between success and failure. As an added kick in the balls dieing during a mission resets all the secret crates you picked up during that mission so you need to pick them all up again which gets pretty tedious on missions where you die constantly.

Helicopters will frequently be your go to weapon of destruction due to their steady aim, powerful weapons and the fact the Panau army seems to purchase them in bulk

The actual plot of the game itself is head scratchingly stupid as well and seems more like an excuse lifted out of the first chapter of a Tom Clancy book to blow up stuff. I'm not expecting Shakespeare but I am expecting something at least remotely interesting, instead the plot swings between terribly dull and terribly stupid its a mission in itself to remember just why your on certain missions. Despite a spectacular ending sequence the actual conclusion is so hideously stupid I'm still baffled the developers signed off on it. Spoiler Alert, skip to the next paragraph if you must: At the end of the game the hero Rico detonates a nuclear device over the Panau oil fields destroying them, the CIA aren't very happy about this but Rico responds that he did it "to free the inoocent people of Panau from fear and poverty". Right, because nothing frees a nation from poverty like destroying their only tradeable natural resource. At least they've got tourism to fall back on I suppose, oh wait, there's a giant area of the island suffering nuclear fallout now, ouch. I get that its the popular opinion that fossil fuels are the devil in our post Inconvenient Truth world, but I really fail to understand how destroying them makes Rico a noble saviour of the people. He's pretty much doomed the island of Panau.

The biggest issue with Just Cause 2 is that the Island of Panau itself is seriously lacking in character. The island is, I believe, the biggest traversable environment made in any game, but great expanses of it are devoid of anything interesting other than the odd tree and there isn't much to see and do besides earn Chaos points. There's a few amusing easter eggs to find but with a game guide and a borrowed Harrier jet you can see them all in fifteen minutes. There are also never many civilians moving around on screen, even in the major city areas, and your attempts to destroy the entire military industrial infrastructure of the island seems to be the most exciitng thing going on. You never see any of the three factions having their own little tet a tet with each other or the military, it's like the whole island is sitting patiently waiting for you to do something. I don't want my open world games to be a static world that only pushes back when I push at it, I want to believe the world is still going on when I'm not there. Think of Liberty City in GTA IV or Renaissance Italy in Assassin's Creed and all the little things that made it feel like a living world you had been dropped into. Panau just doesn't have that feel to it.

Don't we all look at those giant construction cranes and think 'I should ride a motorbike of one of those'?

Just Cause 2 is fun in small bursts and definitely sets a new bar in size and scope for virtual worlds. The PS3 version also has the innovative feature of letting players record their stunts and post them online (I had the Xbox 360 version which was a shame because I had a terrific sequence riding an exploding gas cylinder). But it doesn't draw you in for and demand you keep playing the game to its conclusion. A game should encourage you to play it, but Just Cause 2 seems to encourage you to ignore the crappy missions and tool around with your abilities and stunt opportunities, this is definitely fun to do for a few hours but for me personally thats about it. If you're a fan of pushing game physics every way they possibly can and setting up crazy stunts to record for YouTube then you'll definitely get some mileage out of Just Cause 2. The original Just Cause was often described as a very nice tech demo with a rubbish game layered over the top of it and Just Cause 2 is a victim of the same problem. The developers have created a game with a ton of really fun things to do, but they haven't given them a really strong frame of reference in which to do them. Technically there's some great stuff in Just Cause 2, the controls and stunt features are excellent. But every single other part of the game feels like an after thought.

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