Just Cause

By: Ryan

Just Cause is a massive sandbox type world that was an early release for the Xbox 360 (9/26/06 available for Xbox, Xbox 360, PS3, and PS2). In this game you play as an undercover CIA agent named Rico Rodriguez, and yes your hair is glorious. You have been assigned to overthrow the dictator of a South American island called San Esperito. There is already a war building inside between the police, cartels, and guerilla fighters all trying to control the island and the WMD's that have been stockpiled there.

The freedom in this game is astounding, where you can attack the missions however you like. By boat, plane, helicopter, car, and travel over 1,000 miles of jungles, forests, clear blue beaches, cities, small villages, and the endless mountains. There are absolutely no loading screens whatsoever and the animation and cut scenes look semi-cartoonish but are quality.

If you were a fan of the GTA series game play than you will most likely enjoy Just Cause and the boundless limits they give you. The island itself is absolutely huge and would take up plenty of your free time if you attempted to walk or god forbid swim from one side to the other. There are villages on the beach, roads that can get you everywhere but are mostly dirt other than the highways, small cities with larger business buildings, military bases which will get you attacked pretty quickly, airports where you can steal planes, and some marinas. For the most part the island is just mountains and jungle and become a lot of beautiful filler space as you fly from one end to the other over and over. Other than liberating the occasional village, drug cartel hideout, or city.

Your "partners", if you can call them that since they spend most of the time lounging on the beach, getting drunk, and giving you orders, are Sheldon the man in charge who gives off the fatherly American dad persona, and Kane who is just another bad ass video game chick whom you think Rico slept with before the game was made. Occasionally they will be more involved in a mission but no more than making you leave that cool ass vehicle you just found and trading it for a small boat or crappy helicopter with no missiles. Your real partners in this game become the AI controlled People's Revolutionary Army and the Riojas drug cartel who you can see fighting the police and Montano drug cartel regularly on the streets.

You start the game off by freefalling out of an airplane which I must say is one of the best ways I've ever entered a game. You have to land on the marker where you radar is, and deploy your parachute to give yourself a nice safe landing right into the heart of a firefight. Now the parachute is the best item in the game, you get it right off the bat, you can use it unlimited times, so that means you can jump out of any aircraft, off any building and just float to the bottom. Combined with the grappling hook you get early in, you can hijack helicopters, boats, planes, and parasailing behind cars down the highway.

As for the rest of the missions? Well the main story line is fun to play, you certainly do get to wreak havoc all over the island. Starting with corrupt cops, ending with corrupt politicians, and destroying everything else in the middle is what you are all about. Unfortunately you don't need much skill to do most of this. The auto targeting system in place does most of the work for you, only needing your ass to hold the trigger down and point in the general direction. This feature is more annoying in the console versions and also gets in the way if you are trying to aim for something in the middle of a bunch of bad amigos. In my opinion the best way to eliminate a group of crazy bastards or a road blockade is to throw a grenade at it, than shoot it in mid air. This only requires you to point in the direction of the grenade, leaving the game to take care of the rest.

The main mission involves taking down el presidente, one Salvador Mendoza, which is relatively short and can be taken care of in six hours or less. As you play there are lots of checkpoints (ie. while doing missions each major part is a checkpoint once completed) so if you die you won't have to start from the beginning most times. Mission game play as well as where the next checkpoint is going to occur is usually pretty obvious even to a novice gamer. As stated before, the independence the game allows you to have the means that you can attack a mission from dozens of different angles, with different weapons, and a reply of the game would most likely not result in the same approach to missions as previously played. The downside, because there always is one, would be that it's mostly a lot of repetitive mission objectives and game play.

You do get a bunch of different weapons throughout the game though, acquiring better and different guns as you complete more missions. Different kinds of automatic rifles, pistols (including dual pistols with unlimited ammo a weapon you always have with you), sniper rifles, rocket launchers, and much more in between. At your safe houses you get to store cool vehicles that you come across, though I never found the point in doing this because once you take it out most times you end up driving it off a cliff so that you can parachute out and steal a helicopter in mid fall, leaving you to watch that beautiful vehicle you were saving to crash and explode on the rocks below.

There are certain incentives that the console version gives you over PC, name a few would be the achievements which a lot of people enjoy trying to obtain. The console version also looks smoother, appears to run cleaner, and more crisp. There are no difference in objectives in either version, no more or less villages or cities. In my opinion either the PC or 360 versions are the most fun to get into. I am biased for PC games though since I usually feel they allow you more control over your actions.

Either way this is a game that you will fall in love with right off the bat or end up wondering what the hell you are supposed to do now that you are falling out of a plane and the designers ignored the laws of physics. I guess you could say there is a political edge to the game since it is dealing with you being involved with the CIA and engaging in actions that the U.S. has itself engaged in. But in the end this game is worth a shot, if not for the sandbox style world, than for the rules that it breaks to make it stand out among the crowd.