Just Cause review

Published by Eidos and developed by Avalanche Studios, Just Cause is a game released in 2006, which recently spawned a “sequel” Just Cause 2.

The story follows Rico Rodriguez (Who you play as) as he liberates the island of San Esperito from President Mendoza. The basis is pretty by-the-numbers, but the missions manage to just break free of the “generic” label, by managing to mix some stuff up, and offering a wide number of ways to do a certain task. Being a sandbox game, it is of course completely open to exploration, and flying up high in a plane and marvelling at how big the game map is has to be done.

Alongside the missions, you also have some small side missions to complete that earn you “prestige points” with the Guerillas and the Riojas. As you advance in the ranks by doing some repetitive missions (Liberating towns for Guerillas, gaining a Montano villa for the Riojas), you unlock various safehouses and weapons. This offers a slight incentive, but isn’t all that necessary to advance through the game.

The handling on cars and bikes is something that you need to struggle with. Due to the dirt roads that seem to form a majority of the roads, your vehicle can’t get a good grip and slides all over the place when you try turning, which can be quite frustrating, especially if it just so happens to throw you off a cliff during a particularly hectic part of a mission. Thankfully, the planes and boats handle just fine, although obviously the big trawlers and transport planes won’t be quite as nimble as their smalled counterparts.

The graphics are pretty standard fare for a sandbox game, as the vast environment means that it can’t look as detailed as the smaller games can. There are some glitches where if you move the camera so it is close enough to Rico’s head, you see through the back of his head and at the back of his face, which isn’t all too appealing either.

The arsenal of weapons in this game is not very impressive, however. Featuring a few variants on a pistol, assault rifle, uzi and shotgun, that’s effectively your lot. In fact, the whole game can be breezed through with your twin pistols, which have infinite ammo, which pretty much renders all of the other weapons as just something superficial. Although I won’t deny I found the uzi quite nice to use.

The gameplay itself gets a bit let down by some shoddy controls. Wasting 10 uzi bullets every time you hit a rock on your bike without noticing due to the accelerate button being the same as the fire button doesn’t sound like much, but everything adds up far too quickly. Other issues also occur, but none seem to be more noticeable or annoying than this.

So, ratings.

Gameplay- 7/10. It’s mostly good, but the somewhat shoddy controls let it down.

Replayability- 5/10. There’s little to come back for here. Maybe if you want to complete all the missions again, but apart from that there isn’t much.

Lifespan- 8/10. It’s another game that depends on how long you take to go through it, and how many side-missions and how much exploring you want to do. I gave it an average rating of 8, as it does last quite a long time.

Comments and critique down below.