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Just Cause 2 was a rollercoaster of a ride on my opinion meter as I have spent many hours with it.  First were the pre-launch videos that showed off a bevy of cool stunts that left me with my mouth wide open.  Then began my disappointment when I first played and continued to run out of ammo and dying before I could pull off anything remotely cool.  My final stage of Just Cause 2 was one of wonder, as I slowly started to understand what the game was asking of me, and how I had to play it.  Just Cause 2 is the epitome of open world titles.  It is a sandbox that you are dropped into to play and create your own fun and story be damned.  If you can walk into Just Cause 2 with that frame of mind, you will find a load of fun.   If not, Just Cause is not for you.

Just Cause 2 continues the escapades of super agent, Rico Rodriguez, who has been tasked by the Agency to take down a rogue government in the island country of Panau.  Rico is being sent in to disrupt the government by unleashing boatloads of chaos upon the island.  Now I could give you a lot more meat to that story, but to be honest, it really doesn’t matter.  The story is convoluted and disjointed at times, but even Just Cause 2 winks at you with its story.  The developers are more concerned with you playing in their toybox, and in this case, the toybox is an island waiting to be explored.

Yes, the real story is the island of Panau and all of its exotic locations.  You never truly understand the scope of size of the environment until you fully zoom out from your location and you start to understand what you have walked into with Just Cause 2.  From wide open deserts to snowy mountain peaks, you run across a wide variety of locations, 375 detailed locations to be exact and in each there are multiple of options for a player to cause chaos.

Chaos rules your progression.  Chaos is the currency to unlock mission and progress the story, if that is your point of playing Just Cause 2.  However, if you are only here for the story, you will never get the full enjoyment of the game.  You will only find the fun by exploring and causing mayhem and chaos.  And how do you make the chaos happen?  Well, Just Cause makes this easy by marking items in red at each location.  If something is marked red, you probably want to blow the crap out of it.  Gas tanks, propane tanks, statues, hangers, vehicles and more are on the island to be destroyed by you, the player.

With all of this chaos came a load of problems and it will cause massive amounts of frustrations if you do not understand this point.  You need to use all the tools available to you to make the most of your trip to Panau.  If you try to walk into a base or a city and just shoot it out with the bad guys, you will continuously die and want to quit playing.  Instead, you need to use your grappling hook, parachute, vehicles and more to make the most of the destructive possibilities.  After a few hours of constantly dying and respawning, I got the idea that I can’t just walk into every situation.  You need to survey each location and plan out your destruction.  I found out that you might want to hijack a helicopter and shoot out the outer defenses, then parachute in, shooting out explosive canisters to thin out the enemy emplacements.  Finally you work with the grappling hook to attach people to walls, canisters and more to finish off a base or city.  In the moment of doing something like this, Just Cause 2 starts to click for the player.    You as the player need to be inventive and use your tools to unlock the most devastation and destruction to make the game fun.

Working your way through the island is a stunning affair.  I was amazed at the graphical fidelity of the world and how beautifully it looked.  Jungles are vibrant and lush, while deserts are desolate and dusty.  With a high end graphics card, you will be playing through one of the best looking games on the PC at this moment in time.  The game does scale to different machines, but if you do not have a high end video card, you will be doing a disservice to yourself and Just Cause 2.  Character animations are a bit bland outside of the main characters, and most look the same, with limited detail.  However, when you are blowing them up by the boatloads, you will never really notice.  Voice acting on the other hand is terrible.  Every character will make your ears bleed with the pain that is inflicted on them.  It is cheesy voice work, but cheesy in the worst possible way.  When you hear the leader of the Reapers mention, “Da Reee-peeers” one more time, you will look for the closest utensil to stab your ears out.  Even the main characters are voiced horribly.  Luckily, they only really speak during cutscenes, but when they do, ouch.

Technically, I ran into no issues with Just Cause 2 on my hardware.  There were no bugs or glitches that I ran into while I played through 20 or so hours of gameplay.  I was running the game on a Q6600 Intel Quad Core with 6GB of RAM and an Nvidia GTX 275 video card with 896MB of RAM.  There was a patch released, but I never saw any of the issues that were mentioned in the fix.  I did not get a chance to try the DX 11 stuff, as I do not have an ATI card at this time.  Also, beware that the game is a DX10 entry point vehicle, so XP users should not apply.

Just Cause 2 does not offer much outside of its exploration and flimsy story.  There is no multiplayer or co-op to speak of, and the DLC that has been offered is a few vehicles.  Beyond that, there is not much.  If you are coming into it for a long, robust storyline, you are playing the wrong game.  Also, while creating mayhem is fun, it can be a bit repetitive after many hours.  Just Cause 2 is best played a few hours at a time, and then rinsing with something completely different.  The save system is also way borked.  You can save anywhere, or at least you think that is the case.  However, when you save, and then look to load, it just loads you to the closest stronghold base that you have unlocked.  There is nothing worse than being on the other side of the island, unleashing some chaos and dying, only to be whisked back to a stronghold completely opposite of where you are located.  It is not detrimental, and no progress is lost in regards to the destruction you have leveled, but it means traveling back to where you came from, again.

Just Cause 2 is a lot of fun if you are willing to learn the mechanics of what the game is asking of you.  It is a wide open environment that is begs to be explored and conquered.  Completionists will find hundreds of hours in the game, with so many unlockables and locations to be found.  Creative minds will end up spending hours putting together Rube Goldberg styled destruction stunts.  The only ones that will probably be disappointed are those looking for a structured storyline, or cannot learn to just have a lot of fun within the diverse environment.  Just Cause 2 is by no means a great game, but it is a hell of a lot of fun.  Just Cause 2 gets 4 out of 5 Aeropausonauts.
Check out Just Cause 2 and other PC  reviews at Test Freaks.