My view of this game is extremely unpopular, but I'll tell you why this game is made of pure suck.
Verdict? I'm still fairly convinced that this game sucks more than any game I can remember playing recently, I'll try to relax a bit and tell you why it does. Yes, I know my view of this game is extremely unpopular with the just-out-of-school-for-Spring-break kiddo crowd, but I will give you my honest feedback on this craptastic island adventure filled with exquisitely beautiful scenery and terrible everything else.
Let me start by saying this, a game is supposed to flow so that you can keep focused on the game, gameplay, action, story, etc. This game fails in that aspect completely. Don't believe me? Check the other reviews, they'll give the game a 9.0+ score, but if you read into it, most of them have the word "annoying" , "annoyed" or "frustrated" in them multiple times.
And yes, this game is incredibly annoying because it's riddled with what I feel are major bugs. For instance, in the car chase scenes, you'll find yourself having your weapon's cross hair aimed directly at your enemy's body or head, but when you pull the trigger, the bullets miss the person completely. So, you end up having to spray and pray to kill someone that is popping their body out of the side of the vehicle. However, this issue only happens in the car chase scenes and moving vehicle takeovers.
So, what ends up happening, while in the midst of a heavy action packed car chase scene, you end up using up tons of ammo on a guy that manages to live anyway. This happens with every damn enemy you shoot at during a moving vehicle takeover. Now that you're out of ammo and enemy laughing right at your face, you end up having to jump off the car and onto the road to scurry about for ammo so you can continue with the action. I mean, if that's not obnoxious, I don't know what is. So much for game flow. And come on, shooting people shouldn't be frustrating, especially in a game where you're a dog gamned mercenary that kills for a living!
Another issue I found was when you first try to dual grapple two objects together, the pop-up hints fail to tell you that you need to grapple in a clockwise motion or your attempts to grapple two objects together will end up in utter failure. The problem is, the programmers didn't take the time to make a counter-clockwise animation to dual grapple two objects together. Seems harmless and just a minor setback right? But until you've sat there for several minutes trying to accomplish a dual grapple and seeing it fail over and over and, without knowing why, it's no fun.
Above and beyond those annoyances, you could end up getting pretty far in a mission, but somehow get killed... so you end up having to go through the entire thing again from the beginning and end up feeling like you've just wasted a cumulatively large amount of time. Can someone double-check the checkpoint system, please? I guess not.
Other annoyances include, crappy vehicle handling, super unrealistic ragdoll physics after a kill, extremely limited ammo, very few cut scenes and those that are there are quite uninspiring and unimaginative, terrible storyline, etc.
While we're still on the subject of annoying, I have to bring up the voice acting and over the top characters in this game. I mean, it is just terrible. The actors are extremely corny and seem to try too hard to sound cool. Sadly, their attempts to sound cool and hip are a bit too exaggerated. So much so that it leaves you with a bad taste in your mouth. To put it bluntly, the overacting stinks. You'll also find yourself coming across some fingernails-going-down-the-chalkboard annoying characters in this game too. Top that with the most unrealistic Asian accent that I've never heard from any of my Asian relatives or friends, and you've got yourself a recipe for a voice over gaming disaster.
I will admit though that, unfortunately, for the developers that created Just Cause 2, I just recently came down from a gaming high given to me by playing Dragon Age: Origins. So, coming from that epic adventure to this wanna-be island version of GTA, my opinions about this game are clearly lop-sided because of the high standards in gaming that the BioWare developers have set.
In summary, this game could have been awesome. But instead, you have a bunch of developers that know how to make the game look great, but didn't put enough time or money into Quality Assurance to get annoying bugs that completely kill the game flow out of the way, before public consumption. But, I should've known this game was going to suck as soon as I saw the wanna-be Antonio Banderas leading hero jump out of the helicopter with his trying-too-hard-to-sound-sexy accent.
Though, my review of this game is not in it's favor, please feel free to waste $50 and try it yourself. If you like it, great. If not, don't say I didn't warn you. Folks, this game is meant for kids with high testosterone imbalances that are easily thrilled by things blowing up.