Knights of the Cardboard Castle

Anyone who reads this blog will know that I’m a sucker for open-world games. But I’ve played so many of them over the past couple of years that even I’m starting to get a bit tired of the genre. But then I got around to playing Just Cause 2, which was very well received on the QT3 forums when it came out last year, and it reminded me what the open in open-world games really mean. I skipped the first game of the series due to mediocre but the sequel seems to have been cleaned up and polished to perfection.

The Low-down

• As Rico Rodriguez, a special agent for a secret black ops division of the CIA, you’re basically James Bond, Rambo, Jason Bourne and every other action hero you can think of rolled into one being. You’re sent to Panau, a fictional country somewhere in Southeast Asia, when the previous US-friendly dictator passed away under suspicious circumstances. The dictator’s son Baby Panay ascends to the presidency and is far from being a good pal of the US. Things seem to get worse when an agency operative, Tom Sheldon, who is also Rico’s mentor, seems to have gone rogue in Panau. So in comes Rico to save the day and effect a little regime change.

• Naturally, Rico is an expert marksman and is tough enough to take a few bullets. He’ll still die rather easily under concentrated fire so don’t expect him to stand his ground against an army and live. His signature ability is his incredible mobility. He’s equipped with a grappling hook that can attach itself to any solid surface up to 100 meters away and a parachute that is magically able to stow itself away instantly after use. Combined, these two toys allow Rico to take to the air anytime, anywhere and escape from danger with ease.

• Doing just about anything in the world earns you Chaos and money. Money is spent on buying weapons and vehicles from the black market dealer, who arrives in a helicopter to deliver the goods. Chaos unlocks missions, especially those that are part of the main plot. In addition, there are tons of collectibles out in the wild. Armor upgrades add a tiny sliver to your maximum whenever you get a set of five of them. Weapon and vehicle parts can be used to upgrade the appropriate items at the black market. Cash collectibles just give you money and faction items are just for bragging rights.
• Optional activities include the usual racing that you’ll find in any open-world game. There are land vehicle races and air vehicle races. There are also diving races, which have you diving off from a platform and trying to go through a series of checkpoints before you hit the ground. As you travel throughout Panau, you can also destroy government property such as gas tanks, communications antennas and power generators to raise the Chaos level. Spread throughout Panau are named Colonels which are tougher than normal soldiers. Assassinating them can be thought of as a side activity. Finally, each of the three factions offer three stronghold missions. Once you complete each of them, the site becomes a stronghold for that faction, allowing you to respawn there when you die and sometimes stock up on ammunition or grab a handy vehicle.
• The Heat rating here acts just like the Wanted rating in the Grand Theft Auto games. Blowing up stuff and killing lots of soldiers drives Heat higher and higher, causing the military to call in attack helicopters and air drop in elite soldiers to confront you. Just getting away from soldiers and staying out of sight is enough to get your Heat to slowly drop over time.

The Good Stuff

• The world is seriously huge. I mean, you have tons of transport options, attack helicopters, speedboats, even jet fighters. If all else fails, Rico can make decent time just with his grappling hook and parachute. But traveling from one corner of the map to the other still takes ages. It’s not just empty, featureless terrain either. There is cool stuff everywhere to see. A ski resort hidden in the mountains, a party on the beach, a lighthouse on the coast etc. It is mind boggling how much work went into building all that detail when most of it is never seen in any scripted mission. This is an explorer’s dream.
• Panau boasts an astonishing variety of environments. It’s absurd given that it’s supposed to be a Southeast Asian country, but it’s a game and I love how cool it feels to be flying through snow-capped mountains one moment, crash into a tropical jungle the next and then take a boat into a desert. There’s even a complete metropolis that wouldn’t be out of place in a Grand Theft Auto game. Each environment comes with its own distinct architectural style as well, so you’ll see Malaysian-style villages in the tropics, Chinese temples and castles in the snowy areas, Middle-Eastern houses in the desert etc.
• This is one of the most gorgeous games I’ve ever played. The most impressive part is how scenic it looks. The developers even took the time to create a decent looking underwater world, complete with fish, rocks and coral. I can’t think of anything like this since World of Warcraft. I also don’t think that any game does extreme draw distances as well as Just Cause 2. You can spot a tall hotel tower far off in the distance from a mountaintop and a tall structure with glimmering lights and as you move towards it more and more details come in view. Graphical details on NPCs and enemies are less convincing but this isn’t the kind of game in which you spend a lot of time looking at other people anyway.

• Rico’s extreme mobility makes this game truly unique. If you’re in a land vehicle race and happen to see a faster car on the road, it’s a cinch to jump onto the roof of your car, grapple onto the new car and wrestle the original driver out to take it over, and all this while still traveling towards the checkpoint. If an attack helicopter comes gunning for you, just find some cover and force it to fly in low, then pop up to grapple onto the chopper.
• Each settlement, whether a military base, city district or village has its completion percentage, which fills up as you destroy government property and scoop up all the resources. Your mini-map has an indicator which lights up when a resource collectible is nearby. Plus faction collectibles are all marked on your map so you merely need to travel there. All this makes it incredibly addictive to complete each settlement and collect everything. Someone with a serious case of OCD could spend years trying to 100% the whole game, what with the ridiculous number of settlements and bases scattered across the map.
• Messing around with the grappling hook is a fun physics game in of itself. You can use it to attach any two objects together, and the results can be quite amusing. The game suggests attaching a heavy vehicle to a statue of Baby Panay for example to pull it down. Attaching a suitable sturdy and heavy object to the back of a car and will turn it into a wrecking ball while you’re driving around. Similarly, if multiple enemy cars are pursuing you, you can attach the two of them together with your cable to take them both out at the same time. Most of the time, using a gun is still easier and more convenient, but you might want to use the grappling hook once in a while to keep things lively.

The Bad Stuff

• The gunplay is merely average and too gamey for my tastes. You can take your time to line up headshots for more damage, but this is really a run and gun game, and usually the bigger the gun the better. Playing using an Xbox 360 gamepad, I ended up relying on the auto-aim most of the time and it worked fine even on Experienced difficulty.
• Vehicle controls are somewhat iffy, making them frustrating to use. Planes in particular are almost completely useless due to the lack of yaw controls. If you need to turn a plane, your only option is to roll it to one side and pitch the nose to change its direction.
• Given how disposable the vehicles and weapons are in the game, the prices on the Black Market seem to be on the high side. You’ll end up buying them anyway since there’s no other use for money, but unless you restrict yourself to the weapons commonly used by the Panuan military and so can scrounge for ammunition from dead foes, you might myself yourself out of bullets fairly often. Running out of explosives can be especially annoying since many types of sabotage targets are invulnerable to small arms fire.

• The main storyline is totally ridiculous, even if everything is tongue in cheek. I felt bad about blowing up all those water tanks and power generators that these poor villages probably depended on just to erode the power of their dictatorial government. I know that the portrayal of the CIA as completely callous and amoral and all the great powers as being just greedy capitalists is meant to be silly but all the gung-ho American patriotism still grates on my nerves.

And really that’s about it for the bad news because Just Cause 2 is about as close as I can imagine anyone can get to a pitch perfect action game set in an open world. For Malaysians in particular, it’s a real hoot to see snatches of the local language and accents being used, even if they ended up mangling everything. For example, they tried to add the “-lah” that Malaysians use in the dialogue and mustn’t have realized that it only goes at the end of sentences so the voice acting is wrong, and just why would a country name its only nuclear reactor “Awan Cendawan” unless it was hoping for a nuclear meltdown? Plus check out the fake Singaporean accent used by the Bolo Santosi character in the game and the Minangkabau roofs on some buildings in the tropics.