Continuing the trend of decent sequels, Just Cause 2 makes you feel the very concept of large-scale chaos.
The main problem was always the same: eventual boredom occurring either from repetitiveness, or an overall lack of content. Games like Prototype and inFamous tried fixing this by making the characters overpowered, but the concept was primitive at best. I'm not really leading to the fact that Just Cause 2 suddenly came out a perfect and diverse experience, but the sequel to a mediocre game developed by Square Enix got pretty close.
The game evolves around Rico Rodriguez, returning as the protagonist from the original game. The story takes him to the fictional islands of Panau in the Pacific. The situation is bad: after losing their president, corruption erupts when multiple gangs begin fighting for control over the lands, and soon an unavoidable anarchy erupts. However, for a guy like Rico, bad means business.
There's really no objectively reinforced pretension to how the game handles its story – the predictable, mediocre plot is fueled by stereotypical characters portrayed in obvious references to some of our history's most infamous leaders and dictators. While stupid, the game does a great job of not choking itself in exaggerated seriousness and delivers the plot in the best traditions of B-grade action movies. Translation: it tries, and fails at justifying the mayhem taking place on-screen.
The gameplay in the original was hard in comprehension. The complex mechanics and a more or less successful sandbox environment definitely held the potential, but catastrophically lacked polish and that damned variation. After the game was handed to Square Enix, however, all that potential was realized at its fullest, along with some more.
The mechanics are simple at their basics, Rico controls easily and regards shooting everything that moves as his primary goal in life. He hijacks cars, boats, choppers and planes to move around the gigantic area available for free exploration practically from the very start. He'll eventually team up and fight alongside different mercenary groups to cause even more chaos. That's what you'll be doing too, and while it sounds monotone, the methods of execution really deliver.
Shooting in Just Cause 2 may prove to be fun at some extent, and exploring the island can really impress, especially since there are dozens and dozens of settlements, towns and military bases just waiting to be discovered and blown up. And that, coupled with absolutely Hollywood-ish physics and the hilarious grappling hook system, is one of the biggest and most pleasant surprises this year. Because the sandbox in JC2 actually WORKS.
The grappling hook, coupled with the infinite amount of parachutes Rico magically grows from his spine provide lots of fun ways to move around the island or take down enemies. The physics funhouse works at its peak: the hook allows you to attach any two objects with one another and gleefully see what happens. A Chopper to a school bus, an airborne fighter jet to a nearby mountain ledge, an unlucky NPC to a ruptured gas tank getting ready to rocket in the air, you name it. There is no Mercenaries 2-esque "total destruction", but you'll never feel its lack.
Overall, when you think of it, the main reason some of the freeroam games failed was that because you either had to create fun yourself, or have no fun at all. In Just Cause 2, you don't create, you cause: the fun always finds you itself, and is guaranteed to take you halfway across the map where you'll be base jumping from exploding Boeing planes, shooting up pursuers from a roof of a driverless car, or just chuting from a quad bike just before it crashes into a fuel station. Just for the hell of it.
And while the learning curve for all these advanced tricks may prove to be a bit steep, it's worth getting over. Because apart from being a mini-Hulk, there's no real value in the gameplay, no real depth. The cars and NPCs move around and react in unnatural ways, and you'll be surprised at the unusual lack of details for a modern game, like the absence of stoplights and no real-time ecosystem, despite that the story is entirely focused on warring factions. There's also a sad letdown regarding zero kinds of online play.
It's somewhat compensated by the presentation, though. Just Cause 2 looks gorgeous, with striking texture clarity and professional work with post-effects: the sun rays, particles, shader-generated smoke and the lush HDR work flawlessly, along with the GPU-simulated water which is simply astounding, probably best in industry to date. And the last thing we expect from a third-person sandbox is a genuinely great art direction. You'd think you could never go wrong with tropic islands, but Just Cause 2 brings immense variety to the term, complete with muddy jungles, snowy peaks, gorgeous sunsets and breathtaking urban views. If you've ever modded Crysis with that 3rd person camera view, you'll pretty much have a vision of what Just Cause 2 has accomplished.
And if we overlook the DirectX 10-exclusivity (which means Just Cause 2 won't run on Windows XP), the optimization is quite the miracle, as well. The game runs swiftly on middle-end systems at generally higher amounts of FPS than 30, not even trying to stutter on explosions and action-heavy scenarios. The rest of the porting is done on the same level – the fully implemented keyboard/mouse support is configured decently and lets you switch to an Xbox 360 controller whenever you like, just in case.
The audio side might let you down though. There's no big deal with the crappy music crying out "B-movie" all over again, but the actors were either really determined to fail or simply too bored to try. The heavy accents and high-pitched voices may seem labored upon, but there's no real depth given to the characters, and the main hero drastically lacks charisma, which is, you know, bad.
Nevertheless, the poor acting along with the confusing plot are easily overlooked in favor of the chaos and destruction on-screen. This year definitely proves itself as a year of sequels, and Just Cause 2 stands proud in the list. No sandbox game has ever achieved this much in not only diversifying your gameplay experience, but returning to the roots of the concept of video-games: they are supposed to be fun, without a compromise, and with dozens of surprisingly satisfying explosions.