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Just Cause
By admin | October 17, 2006
Playing in the shoes of mildly topical Rico Rodriguez, a CIA regime change specialist, your holiday trip to the faux South American archipelagos San Espirito is anything but a covert mission. From the moment you parachute into the game, you will basically be shooting and blowing up pretty much everything in an attempt to overthrow the sitting president and help establish the guerilla factions.
The game’s closest comparison games are GTA and, somewhat strangely, Pilotwings - following a sandbox style set up allowing the player to drop in to the main mission or any number of side missions. The Pilotwings comparison comes due to the experience of taking one of the games air-based vehicles for a ride and, of course, the ability to dive out of said vehicles at insane heights only to drift gently earthward via a parachute.
Starting with the bad: Just Cause is simply riddled with issues. some strange pop up bugs, some clipping issues, the sound of the local Policia telling you to “STOP RIGHT THERE” when there is no one in sight and , more importantly, even when you’ve done nothing wrong. The main story itself can be completed in a somewhat short time of around 6-8 hours and whilst there are a large number of other activities to take part in - races (against time, not other racers), collect missions, side quests, and ‘liberations’ - they do become a bit too familiar rather quickly. Perhaps one of the greatest bug-bears in the game is the combat which is over simplistic due to the fact that the automated aiming reduces the combat to a case of simply pointing in the right direction and pulling the trigger. Whilst the targeting is way better and less fiddly than found in the GTA series, Just Cause perhaps takes things the other way and holds the players hand a little too much. The handling of Rico’s health is also somewhat odd - whilst Rico has a health bar which is depleted as you get shot (or blown up) , the last third of the bar will regenerate meaning that even though you are supposed to be close to death, as long as you run away or hide behind a building, you will always survive rendering the full bar redundant.
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So it comes as some surprise that I recommend this game. Despite its many flaws the game oozes a charm that few games these days have. The use of the ‘grapple gun’ to help you latch on to vehicles (be they land, sea or air-based) is insanely fun, allowing you to go from land, to sea, to air effortlessly. The controls are a joy and you never feel that you are fighting with the game. The music is somewhat of a departure from the usual Retro-radio fair, with some fantastic “Mexicana” style tunes that really help set the mood of the game, along with a beautiful ethereal track for those 10ft sky diving trips. The graphical engine for this game is, at times, absolutely stunning. On the ground, the disjointed player animations tend to command too much attention from the fantastic scenery and superb daytime/night time transmissions. The game, however, undergoes an amazing transformation once you get airborne with the scenery looking quite stunning, so much so that simply flying around the island becomes thrilling and that has to be down to Avalanche’s engine: from the sky it makes you feel dizzy and at the waterfront it makes you thirsty. It’s simply that good.
The game itself is centered on mindless fun and realism is basically ignored in favour of entertainment; this is apparent in many small things like being able to fly some planes underwater, having no limit on Rico’s ability to breathe whilst submerged, being able to survive some nasty drops, your parachute not getting caught on foliage and so on… these all go towards helping the game flow as a fun, mayhem-packed adventure. And of course when the mayhem gets too much, you can simply get away from it all with a flight over the luscious terrain. The game also has an interesting sense of humour and closes the game with the El Presidente uttering one of the most comical lines I’ve ever heard, with the odd not-so-subtle pun on Rico’s womanizing cropping up through out the narrative.
So, if you can look through the many flaws that this game has, this is one of the biggest surprises of the next gen to date. A second Just Cause game that takes care of some of the rougher edges could turn out to be something very special indeed.
Topics: Reviews |