It was one of the most eagerly awaited games of last year and this year and now it has slipped to next September but what is Just Cause 2 really all about?
Just Cause was a massive GTA-alike following the adventures of CIA agent Rico Rodriguez in his efforts to effect regime change on a small group of fictional Carribean Islands not too dissimilar to Cuba. Crafted carefully by Scandinavian developer Avalanche Studios, the game was a haven for those looking for some chaotic action and driving stunt hi-jinks.
The game was inspired by everything that made late nineties Bruckheimer movies so successful – huge stunts and explosions and loads of bad guys to shoot. Now Just Cause 2 is hoping to offer all of this and more… This time around, Rico has been dispatched to a small group of islands in the South Pacific to track down his old mentor from the Agency who has gone rogue. It may be a story that is as old as the hills but it never gets old; Avalanche has a few tricks up their sleeve to make sure that this cliche does not get boring.
Whilst Avalanche have changed a significant amount of the game for Just Cause 2, the core of the game remains the same. This time around they have benefitted from a large amount of feedback from the first game. The features that made Just Cause so great are still there and in many cases refined and improved. Many of the problems with the first game have also been addressed. The first Just Cause was a colossal affair with the map occupying a whopping 250,000 acres of space. This dwarfs even GTA 4 in size but there was not a huge amount of variety in the tasks that you could carry out.
Side missions were also very sparsely distributed and much of the map was made up of countryside. In some ways this was great. It gave gamers so much scope to experiment with the awesome stunt aspects of the game and many people went to the trouble of paragliding from one corner of the map to the opposite corner – which took a full 30 minutes I may add. However there was not much variety in game play.
This time around the situation is much different. Side-missions will now be much more varied and much easier to come across and much more varied. The storyline will also feature a greater variety of missions to keep gamers occupied and will also require you to utilise some of the other new aspects of Just Cause 2 which I will get onto shortly. In a playthrough at Edinburgh Interactive 09, the boys from Avalanche showed off some of the variety as they played through three missions for a packed-out viewings room.
This allows me to talk about the news aspects of the game. If you thought that the stunts were fun in the Just Cause then Just Cause 2 will now your socks off. One of the most popular tools in the first game was the grappling hook that Rico carried around with him. It allowed him to paraglide from the back of cars and get up to higher ground with great ease. In Just Cause 2, this has been taken much further. Rico can now use the grapple to propel himself forward whilst paragliding, he can tether himself to airborne helicopters and hijack them mid flight and he can use the grapple to attach things together and that mans pretty much anything in the game.
The penultimate mission of the Edinburgh Interactive playthrough was the first part rescue mission. Rico had to expedite the escape of one of his informants who had been exposed by his former mentor. He was located in a building perched on the edge of a cliff and it had two towers linked together by a glass covered bridge — very Kuala Lumpur. Naturally, the informant is pinned down on the glass bridge with no way out. The only way to save him was to hijack a helicoter and fly up to the building, cimb out of the helicopter as it hovers over the buliding and parachute down to the bridge, hook on with the grapple and break in through the windows next to the informant and then base jump out of the open window with the informant safely in hand. Even in this fairly early build of Just Cause 2 this was a pretty spectacular scene to watch unfold. The ease with which you can carry out such a complicated task is amazing and the whole crowd was stunned into silence by the tenseness of the situation.
This wasn’t the only part of the playthrough that demonstrated how much Just Cause 2 has improved on the original. One of the earlier missions demoed was a journey to destroy a fuel dump. On the trip there Rico used his paraglider and grappling hook to soar very quickly to his objective and then drop in unannounced. He ther proceded to cause chaos at the fule dump by shoting up the place and destroying the giant fuel tanks. Rico was running around and shooting everything in sight using a refined version of the targetting system from the original game.
He also demonstrated some of the grapple’s new features by strapping several guards to fuel barrels and shooting them from range to watch them enjoy a fiery death. This agian was an exceptionally impressive display of just how far the new game has developed beyond the original. In the climax of the demo, Rico and his informant have to escape by car across one of teh islands whilst being pursued by the local army. Now Rico can become a passenger in the car and use his expanded range of stuntman moved to shoot down his pursuers. The whole room watched, captivated, as Rico moved from the roof of his own car to the side, shooting out the tyres of the pursuing army vehicles or tethering them to the road with the grapple and watching as they overturn the moment the tether goes tight. He can also move much more easily between moving cars and he can hang off the side of the enemy vehicles, shoot the occupants and then jump to the relative safety of friendly vehicles or unfold his parachute end disappear into the sky.
If Avalanche had wanted to show that Just Cause 2 was going to be a far grander spectacle than Just Cause was they succeeded and then some. If all goes smoothly at Avalanche Studios between now and next September Just Cause 2 will be the action title to watch come its release later on this year.
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