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

My first playthrough of Just Cause 2 (PS3) ended at about 85 hours. I used this time to finish the main plot and then nab every trophy I could on the Normal difficulty level, including the 75% completion trophy — that’s right, there’s still 25% of everything left to do after over 85 hours! The game’s open world sandbox is truly massive and did an excellent job of holding my attention but it could have been better. Avalanche did a lot of things right in important ways, but maybe we’ll see an even better game if a Just Cause 3 incorporates some improvements.

Some of this could be considered spoiler-ish, if only how it highlights where the game goes and doesn’t go in terms of its different features, story, and characters.

Good: the grappling hook and the parachute
Far and away the most impressive technology in Just Cause 2 is the grappling hook and its integration into the physics of the game. It was extremely rare for me to grapple something and come away unhappy with how Rico either stuck to something or hung from something once he was reeled in. With the hook Rico could stick to just about anything, even things I wouldn’t expect him to stick to, and it made playing the game much more fun. The grappling hook was the best way to get around on foot — advanced tactics like hitting your parachute while reeling in to slingshot over an obstacle or stopping reeling-in mid-way to drop ahead of your target were often helpful.

The grappling hook was also far and away my preferred way to dispatch enemies, partially because those kinds of kills didn’t seem to raise the Heat level much. Dual-hooking or tethering along with the physics engine made things even more fun. Firing the hook into the ground, then the other end at an enemy soldier zipping past on a motorcycle never got old. Neither did dual-hooking a soldier to the edge of a cliff, sending him flying off, or dual-hooking soldiers together two or three times until the impact of them smacking together would kill them both. Tethering objects also was useful, but truthfully it was most useful to me as a weapon. To see what I mean, check out this YouTube video I took of one soldier dying particularly painfully when being pulled off a stairwell:

Hijacking vehicles, jumping on or off them, and otherwise performing crazy, action-movie-style stunts with them using your parachute and grappling hook all worked well in the game. Sometimes you would find yourself jumping onto a nearby car instead of hook-whipping a soldier if you got too close to a car, but overall it worked nicely.

When leaping from a mountaintop or jumping from the black market vendor’s helicopter during an extraction, Just Cause 2 doesn’t punish you for deciding to pull your chute too early. You can always pull your chute, glide a bit, decide to let go of it, plummet down faster, and pull it again. Rico carries an infinite number of the things with him and the developers let him deploy it anytime he’s going fast enough to catch a breeze. That means he can fly up off of a motorcycle, car, truck, plane, or even while being reeled in by his own grappling hook while on foot. This slingshotting effect made getting in and out of tight spots fast and fun, and quickly became my favorite way to get around when an aircraft wasn’t available.

Good: the world
Panau is beautiful, detailed, well-rendered, and has a lot of variety. You’ve got deserts, snowy mountains, tropical shorelines with clear waters, and densely packed palm groves to work your way through.

Good: The map
What higher praise can you heap on a map of a massive open world than merely stating the fact that every discoverable village has a yellow light on the map and every faction collectible item has a blue dot? It makes getting there most of the fun and takes away the gnawing fear that in a world this big you’re missing something important. Just find a dot you want to explore, set the waypoint, and go! And something else to remember is that Panau is massive and feels massive. It takes a very long time (in game terms) to cross great distances if you decide to fly across it yourself, and forget about driving very long distances. It’s always faster to call your black market contact and get an extraction drop to someplace you’ve been before.

Good: death isn’t a big deal, mostly
As long as you’re not using or driving something you bought from the black market vendor, death is not a big deal. Sure you are sent to the nearest stronghold, but a quick call to the black market vendor will drop you to any discovered location quickly enough at no charge. Dying during a mission will bump you back to a mission checkpoint.

Good: showing appropriate stat feedback and the User Interface
The in-game PDA tracks several statistics much like Saints Row 2 did and the GTA games have done. The number of times you’ve made a soldier fall to his death, headshot kills, juggle kills (shooting in midair), pinata kills (whipping a suspended soldier with the grappling hook), kilometers driven, vehicles hijacked, time spent playing, and other numbers are all tracked.

The mini-map, health meter, and Heat tracking is probably the clearest way of demonstrating these in-game elements I’ve yet seen in a sandbox game. The targeting reticle tells you whether someone or the vehicle they’re driving is friend or foe, tells you immediately whether you can grapple to something or not, and the signal strength meter combined with close-range arrows for collectibles makes finding things in the world fun instead of a nuisance. The PDA flashes as stats pass regular intervals or special things happen: drag kills, another hour played, every 5 perfect kills, a headshot, a juggle kill, a colonel assassination — all of these things get you a little visual pat on the head for a brief moment and give you immediate feedback that you have been successful. It’s always fun to grapple a soldier on a catwalk across from you, which will yank him over the rail, send him falling, screaming out of earshot, to be noted by a blip from your PDA incrementing the Fall Kill number when he hits the ground.

Each town, city or military base has a location completion percent that appears when you are close enough, and anything destroyed or picked up in that area contributes to the total. You can tell right away how tough the area is by how much of a percentage gain each item is as you go, and as items are taken care of the percentage number temporarily grows in size as it increments.

Good: short load times
Loading was masked very well when moving through the world, and mission load times were relatively short.

Good: Getting 100% in an area requires risk taking
In order to complete just about any civilian or military settlement you need to stick your neck out. — you need to pick up crates of weapon parts, vehicle parts, or armor and you also need to destroy one or more targets. You can’t roll through in a jeep with a turret on the back and blow everything up, or fly in with a gunship to take it all out and fly off without setting foot on the ground — assuming there aren’t any missile launchers to take you down already. You need to get down in it, and in bigger military bases things get crazy really quick.

Not So Good: The Cheesy Plot, Flat Characters, Weak Dialogue
I was on the fence about the plot and characters for a while. Initially they came across as low budget, but in the end I was able to take them at face value with simple dialogue and a plot from an older-generation of action movie. There are no real surprises that affect the game in any significant way, but on the plus side none of it takes away from the real fun of raising a ruckus in a huge open world.

Rico, his allies, and the main bad guy are very flat and stereotypical action movie characters — think in terms of 1980s action movies and you will be able to understand them better. The weakness of the dialogue didn’t bother me that much since it wasn’t being repeated all the time and it wasn’t grating, but I get the impression that the developers wanted to do a little more with Rico than they did. There isn’t even the faintest pretense that he has any real personal stake in anything going on. He’s a mercenary, plain and simple. There are maybe one or two lines during cut scenes that hint at some thoughts he’s having about the whole adventure or about other characters but nothing ever comes of it.

Not So Good: Stuttering audio
I’ve seen forum posts of worse, but on my PS3 I mainly saw audio stuttering near the end of each cut scene that introduced a faction mission. It happened once per mission, roughly, and really should have been cleaned up before it shipped. This isn’t so much a design issue as a technical one.

Not So Good: No vehicle storage or repair.
We’ve all done it in sandbox games: you find a vehicle that floats your boat and matches your play style and you want to keep it for later on. In Just Cause 2 you get a number of strongholds that dot the map, but no way to stash anything at them, or anywhere else for that matter. This is especially annoying in light of how expendable the black market vendor’s vehicles are. Once they’re chewed up with gunfire, which happens surprisingly quickly in any combat situation, you’re done. There no way to repair vehicles.

A better way would have been to put a rebel sympathizer mechanic in each village, with a sympathizer aircraft mechanic available at 100% captured air bases. You would spend Chaos points to fix up the craft. Thematically this works because the people want you to cause choas and overthrow the dictator. Technically this works because chaos points are relatively plentiful.

Not So Good: one-shot DLC
While what they offered was appealing, the way vehicles and weapons are used in the game makes buying anything from the vendor generally be a waste of money. As I mentioned before the vehicles can’t be repaired, but the weaponry is similarly gimped. The DLC guns have limited ammo and you can’t reload using existing ammunition types. For example, the specialized assault rifle can’t use the standard assault rifle bullets and Rico’s pistol can’t use standard pistol ammunition. Once the bullets are gone, you have to ditch the weapon.

In practice this isn’t really a problem — I ended my first playthrough with literally millions of dollars unspent — but in theory this kept me from ordering vehicles or weapons almost the entire game. I’m not sure if one can earn more money by completing the racing events again, and other than that I can’t think of any way to earn more cash if you spend yourself dry.

Not So Good: Glitchy YouTube Support
YouTube is a great addition for a game like this. I’d love to have seen a longer recording time than 30 seconds, and I’d love to have seen it work all the time. Even after the patch you just don’t know if selecting the option to upload to YouTube will work or if it will lock the game and force you to quit to the XMB without saving. I don’t know or care if the fault lies with Just Cause 2 or the firmware — the game should either be able to compensate for the problem or just not put it in the game. Because I never knew if it would work I used it very rarely, which is a real shame.

Not So Good: Few rewards for completionists
Coloring outside the lines in Just Cause 2 is greatly encouraged. There are tons of places to find, stuff to blow up there, and the same 3 or 4 crate types to pick up in each. Mid-way through the story I ran out of black market weapons and vehicles to unlock. Each faction also had roughly 100 items to find in the world. Finding some or all of these faction items should have given me something other than chaos points and cash — maybe additional weapon crates at that faction’s strongholds, maybe the option to call up faction henchmen on the phone, maybe unlocking a cheat mode or two or three for the next playthrough. A good example of a game that gives you lots of benefits for completing side material is Saints Row 2, another sandbox game. Avalanche would do well to tie chasing down all of these little items and ramping up completion percentages to in-game perks like those instead of just a smattering of trophies.

Don’t get me wrong — I’m thrilled that the trophies don’t require you to find every last thing or complete the game to 100% since that would have been just masochistically difficult and, I suspect, nearly impossible if a glitch or two happened somewhere in the game — but in-game benefits for doing these things, even if they were switches to allow cheat modes in future replays, would have made exploration and collecting far sweeter.

Not So Good: No Multiplayer
Sure you’d have to bend plausibility by making an online co-op player be a clone of Rico with a grappling hook and parachute, but the potential for custom co-op missions or even fun with the campaign is so high here that it’s really unfortunate that there is no online or offline multiplayer in this game. The possibilities opened up by one player driving or flying while the other rides on the roof or hangs on with the grappling hook are endless, to say nothing of the colossal goofing around two determined players with grappling hooks could achieve. While the visual fidelity of the world and everything that happens within it makes me think it would have to take a performance hit of some kind for online play to work, here’s hoping they can do it in their next Just Cause game.

Good: Just Cause 2
In the end I still really enjoyed plowing dozens upon dozens of hours into Just Cause 2. The combination of the beautiful open world, attainable objectives, easy-to-find collectibles and super-power-like grappling hook and parachute made chewing through its wide world of diverse content a pleasure for me.