Just Cause 2

Format PlayStation 3

Developer Avalanche Studios

Publisher Eidos Interactive

Genre Action

9 Comments

252,840 football pitches. Not even a 40-something journeyman footballer like Steve Claridge has come anywhere close to playing on as many grounds. I don't envy the guy who had to calculate such an exact number, but 252,840 footie pitches is apparently equal to 1000km - exactly the same size as the South Pacific island of Panau in Just Cause 2.

See the sights
As Rico Rodriguez sizes up the island from atop a cliff, who am I to argue? From here I can see miles of desert, land stretching out from the sea, and twinkling lights from a distant settlement as the day/night cycle kicks in. It's beautiful and daunting at the same time.

"Everywhere you see, you can go. Every vehicle you see, you can get into," enthuses brand manager Steve Kelsey, no doubt noting the position of my jaw and wanting to lower it even further.

"We really want players to feel like they're in this huge playground where they can do pretty much anything they want," chips in Peter Johansson, lead game designer. "If players see something interesting, they can be sure there's something meaningful and fun to do there."

Still, there's nothing like first-hand proof, so I immediately base jump off the cliff, open the parachute at the last moment and make a perfect landing. The entire island is mine to explore, but for now I'm shown how the parachute can now be used as a form of transportation with the grapple. That's clever.

Grapple-gasm
"Just pull yourself around the island and get a thrust of speed in the air, or use it to get yourself out of danger," suggests Kelsey. "Because the grapple is now attached to Rico's arm, you can use it whenever you want simply by pressing the Left trigger. In the original game, the grapple could only be attached to a vehicle, but now it can be attached to anything in the world: buildings, vehicles, trees, people - you name it."

To test this, Rico starts blasting away in a small settlement, which provokes an immediate response. Soon he's forced to grapple between buildings and swoop around in his parachute to avoid fierce bouts of enemy fire.

Naturally, the grapple also doubles as a weapon, with Rico pulling a guard from a water tower with it who smashes his back on the way down and flips over twice. Havok physics at its grisliest best. Not content with that, Kelsey is quick to list what else the grapple does: "You can yank enemies from ledges, pull them over, haul them out of cars and even tether items together: people to people, people to vehicles, cars to bridges, people to helicopters, helicopters to helicopters..."

Chopper catastrophe
Now this I have to see. Rico duly obliges by tethering two enemies together so they smack into each other in midair at high speed. It's like watching a cartoon where two dumb characters collide, and I half expect to hear a comedy 'boing' sound in time with the impact.

Killing via the more straightforward method of a big gun and lots of bullets introduces the revamped aiming system that gives you full control over the crosshair. You can line up critical shots to the knee or arm and watch enemies stagger around holding their injured limbs, or just blow brains out with a headshot.

Causing all this wanton destruction achieves more than giving you a good laugh. There's an actual 'Chaos' meter, and if you keep filling it you unlock more story missions. Kelsey elaborates on the reason for its inclusion: "In the first game it was very much a case of just working through the key missions - in however many hours - and there was nothing really stopping you from doing that. Now we've got this idea of chaos being the motivator for progression."

There's certainly no shortage of stuff to blow up, topple, destroy or kill. Try 261 settlements for starters, which range from the small one I'm laying waste to here to huge cities. As Rico gains chaos for blowing up a fuel depot, a pop-up caption tells me it's one of 400 dotted around the island. The same captions appear for other vehicles, buildings and objects that get destroyed. Johansson reckons you can spend hours just destroying stuff and still feel like you're making progress: "Players have so much choice with regards how they create chaos, and it's even possible to not do many missions at all if they just keep free-roaming causing chaos in whatever ways they want."

Tied into the chaos system are the roles of the three factions that inhabit the island: the Roaches, the Reapers and the Ular Boys. Johansson reveals how this works: "When you cause chaos you open the door for them to grow stronger, which also benefits your agenda. You can help a faction to storm a military stronghold and establish a headquarters there. Once you do that, their influence grows from this stronghold, and if you cause enough chaos that influence gets progressively larger and larger. New missions then unlock within that area."

Rival factions
Avalanche is reluctant to say how your relationships with these rival gangs are affected by your actions or how you can play one faction off against another to reap greater rewards, but Kelsey hints this isn't really a big concern: "You can align with a single faction, but it's quicker to create chaos if you align with all three. The more you work with each faction, the more missions will open up."

One such mission is the rescue of one of Rico's Agency colleagues, Jade Tan. First, let's recap why Rico is on the island in the first place. His former CO, Tom Sheldon, has gone rogue while doing Agency business in Panau and is apparently working for all three factions. Panau is ruled by a dictator called Baby Panay, so-called because he stands at a measly four feet tall. At this point in the game, Tan has been kidnapped for finding out too much about what Baby Panay is up to, and Rico must work with Sheldon to get her back from a mountain base.

What more stylish way to reach the mountain than in a fighter jet? Fortunately there's a military base nearby, so one vehicle hijack later and I'm on my way to it in a jeep. Rico then uses his parachute and grapple combo to latch onto the jet and surf on top of it before finally ejecting the pilot. Kelsey reckons this is nothing compared to some of the stuff I'll see in a few minutes, explaining: "Stunts let you complete objectives in style. You can hang from a helicopter with a rocket launcher, destroy a fighter jet, and jump from one car to another while they're moving. You have no vertical limits. What you can do is only limited by your imagination."

Drop the baby
My mission objective is to cause enough chaos so that the enemies have to open the doors of the base to flee. Flying into the area low to avoid detection, it still doesn't take long for my jet to be destroyed, so it's back to the grapple and parachute combo. Rico pulls down a radar mast, which impressively crushes other buildings below it, and then throws sticky C4 on a towering (and therefore misleading) statue of Baby Panay. The bloke obviously has little man syndrome.

Now under heavy attack, the enemies call in an attack chopper, so I run over to a mounted mini-gun. I assumed Rico would just stand there blasting away, but as a neat alternative I can rip the gun from its turret and move in and out of cover with it. Hundreds of bullets later and knee-deep in shells, the chopper goes down. With the base doors now open, the final obstacle is a trio of ninjas who, I'm told, are Panay's personal bodyguards. They use smoke grenades to move around stealthily, pretty much disappearing and reappearing at will, and all are pretty good at dodging bullets too. Not for the first time, the grapple comes in handy for tethering them to each other.

The best is saved for last. As the enemies escape hundreds of feet below in a handful of cars, Rico base jumps off the mountain and latches onto one of the moving vehicles. It's really up to you how you take out each car. I started by planting C4 on the roof of the first one, then leaping to the roof of a second before pressing the detonator. This second car had two enemies inside, so I clambered down to the headlights and ducked below the bonnet to avoid fire from the passenger side. After killing him I moved back to the bonnet and shot the driver through the windscreen.

Slick Hollywood style
The entire sequence played out like the slickest Hollywood action movie. I'm also sure there at least a dozen other ways to reach the mountain base, cause enough chaos so the doors open, and finally destroy the cars at the end. If the rest of the story missions are this spectacular and unapologetically unrealistic, then games such as Prototype should be very worried indeed.

And with that stunning finish, my time with Just Cause 2 came to an all-too-quick end. I couldn't quite believe what I'd witnessed - it's all so impressive. This is a massive leap forward from Just Cause, and it makes the first game look like a prototype in desperate need of new ideas and advanced technology.

Free-roaming, open-world games such as Infamous and Prototype are understandably grabbing all the headlines at the moment, but Just Cause 2 has the potential to parachute in from nowhere and shock them both.

Jonathan Todd