Bradylama
So Old I'm Losing Radiation Signs
Just Cause, developed by Avalanche Studios and published by Eidos, is another third-person sandbox game in the ilk of Grand Theft Auto. Its first impressions were of a game capable of taking the GTA formula and not only get it right and make it look better (Saint's Row), but to apply an original spin on the concept by placing you in the shoes of a hispanic secret agent named Rico who specializes in Regime Change. In implementation, however, Just Cause for the PC is a shameless Xbox port that falls flat on its face in almost every aspect.
This game is gorgeous. Absolutely beautiful. Just Cause exudes a tropical feel with thick jungles, clear blue ocean, and lived in villages and cities. The weather effects are also a sight to behold. Storm clouds move across the horizon dynamically, and each cloud has depth. It's an impressive feat for such a massive gameworld, and whoever designed the rivers alone deserves a truckload of cash.
Yet while the scenery is breathtaking and things blow up real good, that's all the game excells at. From stunts to the driving mechanics, almost everything about the game seems designed to completely strip player skill from the equation.
There's a lot of very little to do in this game. There are 21 story missions (which are about as fun as a sack of bent screwdrivers) and an innumerable amount of "side missions" to be performed for the Rebels or Rioja drug cartel. Don't fret, though, because the good people at Avalanche have ensured that factional differences don't mean jack squat. You can complete as many Riojas and Rebel missions as you want and they won't conflict with each other. I think the Rebels rely on the Riojas for financial support, but this is a story so thin it'd fall through the cracks of a dam. The side missions are given by faction representatives at villages and towns (rebels) or manors (Riojas). In order for these mission-givers to be available, though, you have to "liberate" settlements for the respective factions. While any manor can be taken from the Montanos for the Riojas at any time, you must complete story missions in order for provinces to become politically unstable, allowing you to liberate towns for the Rebels.
The reward for doing so is prestige points with the factions, and the unlocking of new safehouses. Each safehouse spawns its own vehicle and has a small arsenal, though Riojas safehouses only have explosives. Every time you die, you'll respawn at the nearest safehouse, but they're ultimately pointless. This is because Rico can be extracted at almost any point on the island, and then immediately dropped off at the next story mission briefing. Earn enough points with the factions, though, and they'll promote you, unlocking better weapons and vehicles at their safehouses. That's pointless too, since the unique weapons can't be picked up from dead enemies, and the stuff you'll pick off of them does the job nicely enough as it is.
The side missions themselves are a randomly-determined set of goals which go as follows: kill the guy, take the thing, hijack the vehicle, blow up the tank. These are cycled over and over, and there are no variations depending on your location. So what's the point in doing a side mission? Wasting time. Seriously. You don't have to green out the whole political map or wipe out the Montanos, since neither case offers you any appreciable reward. It would take days of play time to get full ranks and do all of the story missions, but here's the catch: you could do all the story missions in 6 hours!
The story missions themselves are nothing to shake a stick at. They're more designed and layered than the side missions, but what's there isn't very impressive. One mission, for instance, has you taking a helicopter to blow up rocket parts on a train, which involves flying real low and shooting rockets all over the place. Then once the train is out, you have to kill the depthless ex-Nazi scientist in his gyro copter by pumping him full of missiles until he blows up. Many missions also revolve around assassinating key members of Presidente Mendoza's administration, but the player character has no interaction with them. All you get is a mugshot from your wino informant and the insistance that they're very bad men, though one couldn't care less because as far as the game presents things to the player, the worst crime committed by Mendoza's men is that one of them is a bad lay for prostitutes. One mission involves the assassination of Mendoza's sons, who Rico's Trap insists are a bunch of sickos, but the game doesn't give any reason why they're sickos, and in the end I just feel like a murderer instead of a liberator.
"But how are the stunts?" one might ask. The stunts and 'Hispanic 007' angle were the selling point of the game from the beginning, but stunt performing and implementation leaves a hell of a lot to be desired. You can leap from plane to plane, chopper to chopper, vehicle to vehicle, but none of it really requires any coordination. You could be 20 meters away from a helicopter and still have the option to grab hold of it, instantly teleporting Rico and disorienting the player with the sudden change of perspective. When you grab on to an aircraft or hop on top of a boat or car you're in the stunt position, and you can go to the stunt position from the driver's seat by pressing the F button. The F button is also the button that deploys your parachute in stunt position, while the E button deploys your parachute in free-fall and instantaneously latches Rico onto the nearest vehicle. This is a pretty confusing setup that could've been solved by relegating all stunt functions to the F button while the parachute should have had had exclusive E button use. For instance, say you want to crash a helicopter into an objective and bail out before the impact. That's fine and dandy, but if you bail out and want to deploy your parachute, you'll instead grab onto the plummeting aircraft, ensuring Rico's untimely death. What has been done right, though, is freefalling, the parachute, and the grappling hook.
The convincing physics model makes freefalling a blast. You might find yourself climbing weaponless aircraft to the highest possible altitude just to see if you can freefall and then parachute as close to the briefing point as possible. You'll also get a grappling hook early in the game that will allow you to latch onto any vehicle and tow behind it with your parachute. You can also reel yourself in and take the vehicle, which unfortunately can imbalance a lot of the missions since it's preferable to hijack choppers as soon as they show up, and they're never in short supply.
Mounted weapons, though, are no fun. Fighting on foot involves mouselook and the standard issue aiming reticule, but vehicle weapons automatically lock on to the closest target, and you can only switch targets by pressing the right mouse button. This makes it impossible to target objective-oriented structures, though, which one will want to do quite a bit when there are a lot of enemies around. So in the end, the only thing the player will have direct control over is aiming guns, gliding, and driving, but the driving model is so arcadey that isn't even very satisfying.
The presentation is also God Awful. The game engine couldn't support mouth motions, apparently, so all briefings are introduced and ended in ugly FMVs that never have the same weather conditions as the in-game, have little to no background information, and feature women with all of the plastic appeal of barbie dolls. The story itself is atrociously bare-bones. Rico's only interaction comes from his informants on the island, the rebel leader and his sister, and the head of the Rioja cartel and his wife. Your informants get the most screentime, and while Rico is presented as a suave lady's man, unlike the real 007 the game's supposed to be modeled after, he never consumates any relationship with the transgendered damsels the game tries to pass off as attractive. The menus themselves have no mouse functionality, which is a glaring sign of portitis. Even saving and loading features screens that go through the motions as if it were accessing a flash card. For a game that's also touted as a next gen title, it lacks widescreen functionality.
Ultimately, though, what gets me the most is the complete moral ambiguity behind the Agency's motives. Like I mentioned before, there's nothing to suggest that Mendoza and his men are bad guys outside of the insistance of your comrades, but then there's also nothing to suggest that your comrades are the good guys. What's the rebel plan for the islands? Are they Socialists? Democrats? Libertarians? The rebel leader could have all the qualities of Che Guevera for all the player knows, and supporting the Riojas seems pointless, since as a cartel, there's nothing to guarantee that they wouldn't funnel drugs into the states like the Montanos (in fact, it'd be kind of dumb if they didn't). It also doesn't help that if you go around wildly killing civilians, the only people who show up to protect them are the police, who are the guys you're supposed to be killing. This moral ambiguity wouldn't be so bad if the player was presented with options, but you're straight-jacketed into aligning yourself with the rebels and Riojas. The one thing to suggest that Mendoza is evil is a pitiful WMD program that literally springs up out of nowhere in the mid-game, and nebulous ties to an organization called The Black Hand, which is supposedly a group of terrorists, but there's also nothing to suggest that they are so either. In the end, the only suffering caused by any one is the pain you inflict on Mendoza for the murder of his sons, and that's exactly what I felt like after playing this game. A murderer.
Just Cause is a postcard-pretty romp through a banana republic that'll leave you an empty shell if you were unfortunate enough to have payed full price for it. There was a ton of potential in this title that was fizzled out by piss poor implementation. Adios forever to this piece of trash.
This game is gorgeous. Absolutely beautiful. Just Cause exudes a tropical feel with thick jungles, clear blue ocean, and lived in villages and cities. The weather effects are also a sight to behold. Storm clouds move across the horizon dynamically, and each cloud has depth. It's an impressive feat for such a massive gameworld, and whoever designed the rivers alone deserves a truckload of cash.
Yet while the scenery is breathtaking and things blow up real good, that's all the game excells at. From stunts to the driving mechanics, almost everything about the game seems designed to completely strip player skill from the equation.
There's a lot of very little to do in this game. There are 21 story missions (which are about as fun as a sack of bent screwdrivers) and an innumerable amount of "side missions" to be performed for the Rebels or Rioja drug cartel. Don't fret, though, because the good people at Avalanche have ensured that factional differences don't mean jack squat. You can complete as many Riojas and Rebel missions as you want and they won't conflict with each other. I think the Rebels rely on the Riojas for financial support, but this is a story so thin it'd fall through the cracks of a dam. The side missions are given by faction representatives at villages and towns (rebels) or manors (Riojas). In order for these mission-givers to be available, though, you have to "liberate" settlements for the respective factions. While any manor can be taken from the Montanos for the Riojas at any time, you must complete story missions in order for provinces to become politically unstable, allowing you to liberate towns for the Rebels.
The reward for doing so is prestige points with the factions, and the unlocking of new safehouses. Each safehouse spawns its own vehicle and has a small arsenal, though Riojas safehouses only have explosives. Every time you die, you'll respawn at the nearest safehouse, but they're ultimately pointless. This is because Rico can be extracted at almost any point on the island, and then immediately dropped off at the next story mission briefing. Earn enough points with the factions, though, and they'll promote you, unlocking better weapons and vehicles at their safehouses. That's pointless too, since the unique weapons can't be picked up from dead enemies, and the stuff you'll pick off of them does the job nicely enough as it is.
The side missions themselves are a randomly-determined set of goals which go as follows: kill the guy, take the thing, hijack the vehicle, blow up the tank. These are cycled over and over, and there are no variations depending on your location. So what's the point in doing a side mission? Wasting time. Seriously. You don't have to green out the whole political map or wipe out the Montanos, since neither case offers you any appreciable reward. It would take days of play time to get full ranks and do all of the story missions, but here's the catch: you could do all the story missions in 6 hours!
The story missions themselves are nothing to shake a stick at. They're more designed and layered than the side missions, but what's there isn't very impressive. One mission, for instance, has you taking a helicopter to blow up rocket parts on a train, which involves flying real low and shooting rockets all over the place. Then once the train is out, you have to kill the depthless ex-Nazi scientist in his gyro copter by pumping him full of missiles until he blows up. Many missions also revolve around assassinating key members of Presidente Mendoza's administration, but the player character has no interaction with them. All you get is a mugshot from your wino informant and the insistance that they're very bad men, though one couldn't care less because as far as the game presents things to the player, the worst crime committed by Mendoza's men is that one of them is a bad lay for prostitutes. One mission involves the assassination of Mendoza's sons, who Rico's Trap insists are a bunch of sickos, but the game doesn't give any reason why they're sickos, and in the end I just feel like a murderer instead of a liberator.
"But how are the stunts?" one might ask. The stunts and 'Hispanic 007' angle were the selling point of the game from the beginning, but stunt performing and implementation leaves a hell of a lot to be desired. You can leap from plane to plane, chopper to chopper, vehicle to vehicle, but none of it really requires any coordination. You could be 20 meters away from a helicopter and still have the option to grab hold of it, instantly teleporting Rico and disorienting the player with the sudden change of perspective. When you grab on to an aircraft or hop on top of a boat or car you're in the stunt position, and you can go to the stunt position from the driver's seat by pressing the F button. The F button is also the button that deploys your parachute in stunt position, while the E button deploys your parachute in free-fall and instantaneously latches Rico onto the nearest vehicle. This is a pretty confusing setup that could've been solved by relegating all stunt functions to the F button while the parachute should have had had exclusive E button use. For instance, say you want to crash a helicopter into an objective and bail out before the impact. That's fine and dandy, but if you bail out and want to deploy your parachute, you'll instead grab onto the plummeting aircraft, ensuring Rico's untimely death. What has been done right, though, is freefalling, the parachute, and the grappling hook.
The convincing physics model makes freefalling a blast. You might find yourself climbing weaponless aircraft to the highest possible altitude just to see if you can freefall and then parachute as close to the briefing point as possible. You'll also get a grappling hook early in the game that will allow you to latch onto any vehicle and tow behind it with your parachute. You can also reel yourself in and take the vehicle, which unfortunately can imbalance a lot of the missions since it's preferable to hijack choppers as soon as they show up, and they're never in short supply.
Mounted weapons, though, are no fun. Fighting on foot involves mouselook and the standard issue aiming reticule, but vehicle weapons automatically lock on to the closest target, and you can only switch targets by pressing the right mouse button. This makes it impossible to target objective-oriented structures, though, which one will want to do quite a bit when there are a lot of enemies around. So in the end, the only thing the player will have direct control over is aiming guns, gliding, and driving, but the driving model is so arcadey that isn't even very satisfying.
The presentation is also God Awful. The game engine couldn't support mouth motions, apparently, so all briefings are introduced and ended in ugly FMVs that never have the same weather conditions as the in-game, have little to no background information, and feature women with all of the plastic appeal of barbie dolls. The story itself is atrociously bare-bones. Rico's only interaction comes from his informants on the island, the rebel leader and his sister, and the head of the Rioja cartel and his wife. Your informants get the most screentime, and while Rico is presented as a suave lady's man, unlike the real 007 the game's supposed to be modeled after, he never consumates any relationship with the transgendered damsels the game tries to pass off as attractive. The menus themselves have no mouse functionality, which is a glaring sign of portitis. Even saving and loading features screens that go through the motions as if it were accessing a flash card. For a game that's also touted as a next gen title, it lacks widescreen functionality.
Ultimately, though, what gets me the most is the complete moral ambiguity behind the Agency's motives. Like I mentioned before, there's nothing to suggest that Mendoza and his men are bad guys outside of the insistance of your comrades, but then there's also nothing to suggest that your comrades are the good guys. What's the rebel plan for the islands? Are they Socialists? Democrats? Libertarians? The rebel leader could have all the qualities of Che Guevera for all the player knows, and supporting the Riojas seems pointless, since as a cartel, there's nothing to guarantee that they wouldn't funnel drugs into the states like the Montanos (in fact, it'd be kind of dumb if they didn't). It also doesn't help that if you go around wildly killing civilians, the only people who show up to protect them are the police, who are the guys you're supposed to be killing. This moral ambiguity wouldn't be so bad if the player was presented with options, but you're straight-jacketed into aligning yourself with the rebels and Riojas. The one thing to suggest that Mendoza is evil is a pitiful WMD program that literally springs up out of nowhere in the mid-game, and nebulous ties to an organization called The Black Hand, which is supposedly a group of terrorists, but there's also nothing to suggest that they are so either. In the end, the only suffering caused by any one is the pain you inflict on Mendoza for the murder of his sons, and that's exactly what I felt like after playing this game. A murderer.
Just Cause is a postcard-pretty romp through a banana republic that'll leave you an empty shell if you were unfortunate enough to have payed full price for it. There was a ton of potential in this title that was fizzled out by piss poor implementation. Adios forever to this piece of trash.
