Tiny Diggers – An iPad Construction Truck Game for Kids Age 2-5

After all of the trailers showing off the mayhem that can be achieved in Just Cause 2, I was pretty much changed from a person that had put Just Cause 2 on the back burner, to a must have day one purchase.  The pre-game hype did what it was intended to do, and that was convincing me to purchase a game that was nowhere on my radar.  After spending thirty minutes with the game, I am a bit mixed.  The mayhem and crazy shit was there, but pulling off the moves shown in the “Anatomy of a Stunt” videos was far more difficult to achieve than advertised due to some control issues.  But let’s get down to the business at hand and go through my first thirty minutes with Just Cause 2.

Right from the start, you are thrown into the action.  Sure, there is a short preamble about why you are in Panau, but really, there is not much there to go off of, except that you are there to wreck havoc upon the ruling party, causing enough instability to overthrow the ruling party.  Rico Rodriguez is dropped into a location where you have to take down a small base installation, which is basically a disguise for a training level.  Through the initial mission, I was given all the instructions on how to use the grappling hook, how to shoot and juggle enemies, and most importantly, how to blow stuff up real good.

Through the initial mission, I encountered a host of loyal government soldiers that were willing and able to be cannon fodder for my guns and other means of torture.  Right off the bat, I wanted to start pulling off crazy stunts, which meant attaching people to exploding tank canisters, attaching them to walls and all kinds of other devious means of torturing people before delivering with my .45 caliber handguns of justice.  Unfortunately, I had a lot of trouble with getting people to stick to canisters, due to the sheer number of enemies that attacked me.  Lining up a person with the grappling hook and attaching them to a canister of doom took a bit of time, and time is something I rarely had.  Several times, I died while putting together my Rube Goldberg concoctions, because I had not thinned out the ranks enough.  It quickly became frustrating, which meant I just started using conventional weapons as my means of killing, quickly killing half the fun of Just Cause 2.

While the PC controls were laid out easy enough, I did struggle with the quick time events which required me to enter sequences via the numbers at the top of my keyboard.  I would assume these would be far easier to handle with button presses on a gamepad, but I don’t play shooters on my computer with a gamepad.  I assume I will get use to these over time with the game, but it takes you out of a rhythm when you have to find 1, 2, 3 and 4 on your keyboard while being shot at.  And of course, the key presses are in a different order every time, adding a lot of frustration to my entry.  If you get shot while putting in a code, you have to kill that enemy and start from scratch.

After putting in thirty minutes with Just Cause 2, I am a bit on the fence with the game.  The first mission ended easy enough, and I had enough time to cause some general mayhem on the island, but when I was killed during that mayhem, I was taken all the way back to my location at the end of the mission, losing about 10 minutes of progress.  I guess I need to manually save more often, but it seemed like Just Cause 2 should have been auto-saving more often than it was.  Not a huge flaw, as you can save everywhere on the PC, but just a bit off-putting.  I do think that Just Cause 2 is a game with enough of a learning curve that it goes beyond thirty minutes of gameplay to get everything down right.  I enjoyed my time with the game so far, but I am not at the level of hype I was before the game came out.  That said, I will continue to kick ass and take names on the island of Panau, as there is a ridiculous amount of stuff to do and blow up.  And the game does explosions so well.  Check back for a full review of Just Cause 2 in the near future.