Extreme stunts, great looking graphics and an experience worthy of your time! Non stop fun from beginning
Then this is the game for you.
Rico (you) is equipped with a parachute, tons of weapons and a physique which makes him the ultimate CIA agent.
Rico's mission is to liberate a Caribbean country consisting of several islands which makes up the biggest open ended gaming environment ever seen.
You will complete your missions by soaring through the air, jumping from airplanes to choppers, using your grappling hook to steal anything you want or need.
Gameplay
The first feel of the gameplay in Just Cause is great, its easy to learn and a lot of fun. However, if you want something which you can imagine someone actually managing to do in reality, you will not find it here.
Shooting has been altered from the demo and is now a lot easier, any hostile target will be auto aimed as long as you are facing them, and it is also possible to zoom in which makes the shooting play like an fps, but this is something you never have to do during the entire story.
When you walk around you can jump with the b button, he can jump pretty far, but he can't climb ledges the way you can do it in Saint's Row or GTA: San Andreas.
Should you fall without pressing the jump button you can literally fall a hundred meters down without taking much damage, which is a bit stupid.
Swimming is pretty easy, but you can sometimes get stuck making you unable to move for a short while. And Rico can hold his breath forever.
Flying choppers and planes is great fun and very easy. The weapons some of these vehicles have are missiles and machine gun, which auto aim on anything you want gone.
Ones of the most fun part of Just Cause gameplay is the stunt position, which places you outside of anything you’re driving, here you can chose to enter the vehicle or jump off it.
If you jump off you will fly through the air, you can easily land on nearby cars or choppers making it possible to steal anything at any time.
After completing a few missions you will unlock the Grappling Hook, this can be used to grapple on to anything which moves and allows you to paraglide behind it, you can also shorten or lengthen the line, making it possible to get close enough to steal whatever you need, this feature including free fall and stunt position opens for a lot of crazy gameplay, and lets you pull off the most extreme stunts ever seen in a game to date.
You also got a parachute which can be used an unlimited amount of times, it is easy to control and you can glide very far with it, making BASE jumping from high cliffs an awesome experience.
Overall the gameplay is great fun, but it can be a bit stupid at times, some bugs here and there, but nothing too bad.
Graphics
There has been a great amount of discussion over the graphics in this game. It has pretty poor graphics in cities and not too great character models, but not as bad as some want you thinking.
The jungle look pretty good, but it's very repetitive, and you can walk through a lot of brush and small trees, which looks pretty bad at times.
Cars, choppers and planes look good, but there is not much damage detail, and the explotion graphic on them isn't very interesting.
But nothing, and I mean nothing can be compared to how this game looks when you are two thousand meters up in the sky, flying through clouds and looking down at the beautiful Caribbean landscape, with tons of islands and great mountains, this looks so good that after 20 hours of playing I still like to take a chopper into the sky, drop out and just enjoy the scenery.
The overview look of this game is in fact so good that I'm willing to overlook all the other issues I have with the graphics, it is definatley beautiful.
Sound
The sound is pretty good, but nothing extraordinary, the voice acting is really bad, and sometimes ridiculous. But the music is good, and fits the game perfectly, also changes according to what you do. Vehicles, explosions, and the sound you hear flying through the air is impressive, but the gunfire is pretty bland.
Overall the sound is good, and unless you buy a game solely based on the sound effects you probably won’t have any problems with it.
Main Story
The main story is way too short, I completed the game in less than 10 hours, and I did a lot of free roaming and time wasting, so if you do nothing but missions you could probably be done even quicker than me.
The story is on the other hand not the only thing to do here; you got collect missions, side missions and other tasks as taking over territory, which will add up the game hours pretty quick.
The quality of the story is a bit lacking, with stupid conversations and ridiculous cutscenes, but that doesn't mean it's not fun.
I won’t reveal anymore about the story, play it for yourself and see. ;)
The Bugs!
There is a lot of bugs in this game, as you might have read about in the forums, but the game rarely crashes and the bugs rather makes thing easier than harder.
There are some errors where the interface you've seen shortly before a cutscene gets stuck, but it's not that horrible. The bugs did not ruin my experience of the game, but it was pretty stupid at times.
Achievement Points
Getting a good amount of points in this game is not at all hard.
I got about 450 points in less than 10 hours, and the only reason I haven't got them all yet is because I've been playing other games.
You get all the points playing single player (there is no multiplayer) and a good amount of them is gained from the main story, you also get points for races, stunts and side missions, all which are very easy to get, but require that you spend a little time doing it.
The hardest achievements are without doubt taking over the entire island; you have to take town by town, something which can get hard once you get to the cities, where they got rocket launching tanks and choppers coming after you.
However, out of all the 360 games I've played (not that many yet) this is the one which gives out the quickest and easiest points.
Conclusion
This game is definitely worth buying if you enjoy stunts and pure open ended gameplay.
The game can be very easy, but if you want 100% completing it will require a lot more effort.
It is without doubt one of the most interesting concepts I've seen in a while, but it could have been done a lot better where it not for all the minor and annoying bugs and errors. The game feels like it has been shipped off too early, but it is still a whole lot of fun.
Now please excuse me, there is a settlement which needs liberating.
Viva la Revolucion!