Just Cause 2 Reviews

Nothing beats overthrowing a small island government. In Just Cause 2 you play the part of Rico Rodriguez, a field operative with a specialty in regime changes. Throughout the game you will hunt down government officials, blow up government property and unravel a fascinating story of international espionage. Truly a wonderful game, both in story and graphics, and well worth playing through, if you have some spare time on your hands.


The Gameplay is very well done, responsive controls and very few glitches, this large open world is your playpen. For those of you familiar with Just Cause, you'll be glad to know that the core control system is still present, but with a massive overhaul.

The grappling and parachute system has had a complete change for the better. The new grapple system is simply amazing and probably the best part of this game, allowing you to quickly go from one location to another through a grapple/parachute slingshot system. Also allowing you to quickly climb buildings, pull enemies from guard towers, attach cars to statues to rip them down and countless other uses, the Just Cause 2 grappling hook is simply awe inspiring and will surely entertain anyone who enjoys flying through their game world and maybe playing a little like their Spiderman...

Character movement is unremarkable, it does the job and does it fairly well. Vehicles are controlled fairly well, I found some of the controls a little lagging in the planes, and the helicopter use is a little different if you are coming off finishing the first Just Cause. There are 104 total vehicles in the game and https://www.trueachievements.com/a42742/trying-everythi....htm requires you to drive each and every one. It should be noted that many vehicles may appear the same, but the game cuts corners by adding or taking off a feature of a vehicle and making it a whole new one, a little dissapointing for me.

The weapons system follows the same concept as the original Just Cause, but different input methods. When aiming, you do have an auto-aim for taking down crowds while on the run, just point and fire, but there is also an aim down the sights mode by simply clicking RS. The directional pad is your weapon selector again, but now each direction accesses different weapopn types (i.e. one-handed, two-handed, explosives and weapons drop.) Your Heavy Drop is back again, appearing as the Black Market Beacon allowing you to purchase weapons, vehicles and upgrades with money earned from the games Chaos system.

The games storyline runs off a Chaos system, rewarding destruction with story progression, it is best left to experience in the game and is well explained in the introduction missions, so this is all I'll say about it here.


The Graphic and Sound are very impressive. Personally, playing this after completing Just Cause really impressed. The returning side characters are definitely touched up a lot and Rico himself has gone through a huge remaking. There will be many times when playing this game that you will be parachuting or skydiving and will simply have to admire the scene you are in. There are no invisible walls that could in any way effect gameplay, but there are a lot of closed doors. For the most part, this game is an outdoors game, leaving most of the doors you see locked and shut, another small dissappointment, but not one that is really crucial. The game does very well in making up for it. Sound is decent, but nothing really too catchy, just fills its role well, both in music and sound effects. The only really noteworthy thing in sound is the explosions, in full surround sound, the explosions are glorious.


The Conclusion is that Just Cause 2 is an amazing game, but its not for everyone. The game is an open world sandbox game and the gameplay is very time demanding. You will often find yourself wandering around blowing up and killing anything you can to get to the next mission, a lot of collecting, a lot of missions. But if you enjoy grinding away, then this is a wonderful choice. Similar games are Crackdown or Prototype, so if you enjoyed either of those two, this is that type of game.

The time needed to attain achievements has to be mentioned. If you are looking for quick achievements, there are quite a few that can be obtained rather quickly, but if you want the full 100%, be prepared to put a lot of time into this game. Once you have the story complete, the real grinding begins to mop up the big achievements. So not a quick achievement game.

All in all I'd definitely give this at least a 4.5 out of 5, and due to the lack of halves, I'll just say 5 out of 5 Thanks for reading and please free to comment below. If you do choose to give me a negative review for this, please leave me some contructive criticism below.

Just Cause 2 takes pride in absurdity. A typical mission in the game will have you destroy a dozen vehicles, explode innumerable fuel tanks and massacre a small army. The sort of thing that the attention-deficit might spend the entirety of a Grand Theft Auto game waiting to see, Just Cause 2 has no less that 350 towns and settlements, and they all need ‘liberating’ through means of such missions. In the game’s vernacular, ‘liberating’ means blowing up everything that might possibly explode, killing everything that might possibly be governmentally-employed, and grappling anything that might possibly be made of concrete. It might sound like the particularly low-brow video game a 6-year old Michael Bay envisioned after a sugar injection, but Just Cause 2 makes no excuses. It aims to be fun and achieves it, absurdly.

Aside from the liberation of towns, Just Cause 2 also offers storyline missions, faction missions and challenges (read: races) to keep you occupied. The storyline missions are significantly more OTT than the regular liberations, if only because the plot itself is so hamfisted and cringe-worthy that it’s amazing to think what kinds of ideas were rejected. It’s more or less identical to the plot of the first Just Cause, though set in a slightly larger and much less South American-looking nation, and hindered by even worse voice acting. Rico’s one-liners make a welcome return, possibly the game’s only saving grace in terms of VAs. Plot twists are also thrown in this time around, apparently just for laughs, as you could probably guess the main twist within your first half an hour of play, and the game doesn’t keep up the façade for more than two or three missions. Through the course of the plot, Rico must infiltrate three factions across Panau and help them through way of missions, too. These make up a kind of middle ground between the actually-quite-tame terrorism of liberations and Jesus-Christ-why-is-there-a-tank-on-top-of-a-skyscraper story missions. The challenge missions can bring a nice change of pace from the eye-bleeding frequency of explosions in the main game, but the shoddy handling of most vehicles mean they often bring frustration; you’ll likely just want to rush through all the airborne races before bothering with cars and motorbikes.

The first Just Cause made a great attempt at breaking the mould of the sandbox genre, not least through the scale of its world, but through its visuals, audio, and of course, that damn grappling hook. Just Cause 2 follows suit, mostly; no longer having to cater for last-generation consoles, its appears much more comfortable in higher resolution textures and detailed character models, and the sunsets look as good as ever, but at times it doesn’t quit feel right. The particles and bloom appear to have been toned down, and while this would be a welcome change, it almost felt right to be near-blinded by bloom lighting in a game as absurd in JC. In terms of sound JC2 brings little new to the table. It makes a good effort of distinguishing itself as taking place in an Asian setting as opposed to the South American fanfares of San Esperito, but, bizarrely, the most enjoyable part of flying over mountain ranges to funky background music is now gone. The only thing that greets you now when hijacking a military jet is the sound of its engines. It’s a troubling subtraction and sometimes urges you to take extractions to your destination. Quicker, of course, but not as imaginative.

The grappling hook, now given an entire button of its own, opens up the realm of the much-taunted ‘vertical gameplay’. It works well, too. Before long you’ll be hanging enemies off buildings or dragging them behind in trucks like the pros, but it also often proves tough to work with. It’s possible to grapple two things together, such as the classic man-to-building, but it’s easy to forget when you last used it and you’ll fiddle undoing your last grapple before moving onto your next victim. Other times, the opposite holds true; you’ll be trying to grapple an enemy to a truck and smash him into something for an achievement, say, but the grapple will break before you enter your car. Visual cues to notify of when the grapple is in use would have made things much more fluid, but as it stands, the grappling hook is the fantastic centrepiece of Just Cause 2; it helps distinguish it an over-subscribed genre.

So it doesn’t try and match the narrative highs of GTAIV, or the customisation of Saints Row. It has questionable omissions, such as overworld music or even hints of online modes (despite taking full advantage DLC). The game feels nothing close to empty without these things. Just Cause 2 has its own identity, a badge of absurdity, and wears it with pride.

Just Cause 2 is one of the most enjoyable experiences I have endured. The most enjoyable since I've had my xbox. While the story lacks, the gameplay is incredible and will keep you coming back.

Story
While you're playing, the story will be set on the Back Burner. It's not very interesting, but it can be humorous at times. It's set on a small island called Panau off the coast of SE Asia. You're mission is to end corruption from a small, yet powerful leader. As well as take the oil. The man helping you along the way, Tom Sheldon, is a stereotypical American that can be interesting at times but your character, Rico, is virtually mute besides a few sayings here and there that will get stuck in your head along the way. You have to go through several missions all in the attempt to overthrow the government and go out with a bang..

Gameplay
Just Cause 2 is an open world environment that will literally allow you to go from point A to point B in any way you like. Rather it be walking, running, driving, piloting, or my personal favorite, grappling. The map is incredibly vast and will require a lot of time to explore and enjoy. Causing chaos is the main structure of the game that allows you to unlock new story missions, which progress the main story line, as well as unlocking new weapons, vehicles, and side missions.You can cause chaos in many different ways such as blowing up government property, completing missions, collecting items, killing colonels, and completing towns. Your grappling hook and parachute are always ready to be used and can be used in many different variations to tally up the hours of fun you'll have.


Graphics/Sound
The graphics are stunning on 1080p. Everything is very clear and pristine. And the explosions.. oh my the explosions. They are a sight to see and will keep you craving destruction. From any level or location on the map the sights never seem to disappoint. The sounds and music in the game is quite bland. The voice acting is terrible and cliche, and the in game sounds that you hear over and over will become monotonous.

Achievements
You should be able to get most of the achievements before you fully complete the story missions, but some will require a lot of work and dedication such as 75% completion, 50 challenges, and 100 completed settlements. A second playthrough may be required if you don't play on hardcore the first time. However, I've had loads of fun and put in over 120 hours and am closing in on the last achievement even though i should've gotten it in half the time i've been playing

Overall
Definite 5/5 from me, even if the story is near nonexistant. The gameplay will keep you coming back. Also, this is my first review so lemme know how I did!

Let me just say that if you played the first just cause and atleast liked it, dont' read this review and get Just Cause 2 right now. If you have never played the first just cause, or didn't like it then read this review.

Story: The story is basically just a piece of smelly crap and is similar to the Mercenaries 2 story if you played it. Basically you are Rico Rodreguez and you are part of "The Agency" and you have to go after your former boss from the first Just Cause and to get the info you need to find him you need to work for 3 factions that will drop some info on you. Later it turns into some whole thing and really the story is REALLY BAD it's just uninteresting and sort of dum. 5/10

Sound: The voice acting in this game is not that good because you will have a bunch of characters that will have these annoying accents and every character has one and it gets annoying, I wouldn't mind a few people having those accents but damn. I personally liked Rico's voice acting i thought it was the best out of all of them but still not that good. Everything sounds good except, like I said, the voice acting and sometimes there could be sound glitches. 7.5/10

Graphics: All I can say for this is..WOW...the environments look amazing and the the character models look pretty good. The environments look great and the maps is HUGE, there are 3 regions which are: Desert, Snow, and Jungle.The Desert looks great and there is not necessarily a lot of desert in the map. When you drive a car off the road in the desert a bunch of dirt gathers up on the car and things are very detailed when it comes to the desert area and it looks really cool. The snow area is a pretty god chunk of the map and it is my favorite, the snowy mountains look beautiful and it is very detailed as well, and when you walk around the snow there would be flakes of snow gathering on your pants and that looks pretty cool, and cars have that too. The jungles are also beautiful and take up most of the map. The jungles are designed nicely and have mud gather up on cars if you go offroading and stuff like that. I can't say much about the jungle because I preffered the snow regions myself.There are some little problems like when you fly a helicopter or something and you look down at the trees they look like paper. 9/10


Gameplay: The gameplay is something that will last you for hours....you have over 1,000 collectibles, 65 missions,and hours of fun and exploration. The grappling hook in this game is a key conecpt in this game and is really fun. You can grapple a man to your car and drag hime or grapple him to you plane or helicopter and fly him, or you can grapple soemone to a propane tank shoot the tank and he'll go flying, there are tons of things to do with the hook and is a blast to use. The driving in this game isn't that good and at best it's decent, there are upgrades in the game that make the driving easier but that is something they shouldn'y have added and it could give you the impression that the driving sucks dick.
Some of the missions are a little repetitive but a lot of them are not, some you'll have a lot of fun with. This game will last you hours of gameplay unless you hate exploring and collectibles and stuff like that then this game you might not like. 8.5/10

Achievements: You can obtain half of the gamerscore withing hours but the other half can take very long.
6/10

Overall: This game is definately something you should check out unless you want a good story or you hate complete opposite of linear games. If you like freeroam games and exploring and blowing shit up and having the power of spider man and you can shoot people while having the powers of spiderman,and blowing shit up, then you will love this game. This game can be repetitive at times but a lot of great games are.
8.5 Bitches!

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"It's a tough job, but somebody's gotta do it"

Story
You are Rico "Scorpio" Rodriguez. You are the member of "the agency" (which may or may not just be the CIA) and you have been sent to a glorious region of south-east Asia known as "Panau" to overthrow the evil government and track down a fellow agency member, Tom Sheldon, who is suspected of going rouge. The story in the game is not especially strong, but it is engaging enough. The point is, the story is not the reason you should play this game, which brings us to...

Gameplay It seems I have a little too much to talk about here. I'll have to split things up further.

Panau
This is easily one of the best sandbox games I have ever played. While most games of this particular genre give you a city to play in, Just Cause 2 basically gives you an entire continent. Panau is a beautiful place to explore and mess around in. Once you have completed the first two story missions which serve as your tutorial, you are thrust into this enormous region to do whatever your heart desires, and unlike some games (I'm looking at you, Assassin's Creed) you have the entire game world right off the bat, no story progression required to access any areas.

Chaos Control!
"So what now?" You ask. Well, you can focus on completing the main story if you choose to do so. In order to gain access to the story missions, you need something called chaos. You obtain chaos through various methods; you can find one of the many (over 350) settlements and military bases and begin destroying government property (marked in red with a white star), or you can complete a settlement by destroying all the available property and collecting all the available collectibles, do a race in either a car, plane, boat, or no vehicle at all, do a side mission, or just blow things up (this game can be very explosion-happy). Essentially messing around is the glue that holds this game together, and this works well in the game's favor due to the size of the world and wide range of possible things to do in it.

Missions
"Ok, I've been having alot of fun messing around, why bother doing story missions?" Well, I am glad to say you really must do the story missions because they managed to do something I have only previously seen once (in Saint's Row: The Third) in which the story missions vary so greatly from the rest of the game and are so over-the-top that they are quite a sight to behold. I won't spoil anything, but I will tell you that you won't be disappointing.
Outside of this, you have 49 faction missions in which you work with a gang to cause more chaos. It's funny how you are supposedly doing all of this "for a just cause" but the more you play the game, the more difficult it is to deny your status as a terrorist.
Ignoring that, there is one more mission type: Strongholds. These are probably the worst missions as they are all exactly the same: Protect this guy as you infiltrate a military base, shoot down a helicopter, and you now have a new area of Panau available to you where you can enjoy not being shot at (and also use as a respawn point when you die). Still, I found these to be entertaining as well, and it's great fun to complete these and hear your allies chanting "Scorpio! Scorpio!"

Collectibiles
The collectibles in this game range from parts to upgrade weapons and vehicles to health upgrades to piles of money, skulls, cases of contraband, and black boxes. Overall there are over 2250 of these to find, so if you are a fan of collect-athons (Banjo-Kazooie, Donkey Kong 64, etc) you will have a ball with this one, especially since the collectibles actually get you something in the form of upgrades to make things more worth your while.

Scorpio
Wow I've gotten carried away and forgot to tell you what sets this game apart from the rest. In addition to guns (which you can mix and match dual-wield a la Halo 3) and various vehicles you have a grappling hook and an infinite supply of parachutes available at your disposal. This opens up a world of opportunities for use in getting around, enemy combat, or, once again, causing chaos. I challenge you to come up with a game that would not be improved with the addition of a grappling hook. Please, I have tried and can't come up with anything, hence why this game is so much fun to play. I can assure you hours will be spent zip-lining along, tethering various things to various other things, the possibilities are nearly endless. Do something awesome and you may be rewarded with one of Scorpio's one liners, such as "It's a tough job, but somebody's gotta do it", "Don't take no passengers", "One less pipeline, one less problem", or "Some day they'll write books about this" to name a few.

Graphics
Panau is gorgeous, but sadly the characters in this game are not. It's odd when the cut-scenes actually have the worst graphics in the game. Clearly the focus is on the gigantic world, as it should be.

Setbacks
This should be a short section, I hope. You may have a hard time playing in the beginning due to a relatively steep learning curve and also the requirement of getting used to the physics engine. You may also get bored from time to time when needing to travel long distances, and the store, run by the previously mention Tom Sheldon (who is not nearly as awesome as Sheldon Cooper) only allows you to buy one weapon or vehicle at a time, each time involving a loading screen and cutscene. Fortunately Sheldon also offers fast-travel services to any previously discovered settlement, making Panau slightly more manageable.

Conclusion (Finally!)
You owe it to yourself to at least try this game. With so much to see and do, you will be occupied for hours. Careful, due to a glitch it is actually impossible to 100% this game. The achievements aren't too challenging, but they will take some time (and you only need a in-game completion rate of 75%), so be warned, completionists. Yahtzee of Zero Punctuation fame called this his 2010 game of the year, and while I maintain that Super Mario Galaxy 2 is most deserving of that title, this game should not be passed up. 5/5.

Well, I wasn't expecting such a long review there. Congrats on making it to the end, thanks for reading, leave a comment, and See you next time.

Starting up this game I had moderately high expectations, it was around 7 out of 10 stars over all on most review sites which led me to believe I would at least think it is pretty fun. In this game in a quick play through it will take you around 17 to 20 hours to finish the game. There are only seven main story missions and you will end up having to play about 30 side quests just to UNLOCK the next story mission.



Voice Acting (1 out of 5 stars)

The voice actor of Rico was pretty monotone most of the game a lot of the other voice actors didn't have much inflection in their voices. There were some serious scenes that made me chuckle because of how awkward the lines sounded when the voice actors would say them.



Story (1.5 out of 5 stars)

This story would have made up for the lack of talented voice acting... if it was a game from the 1990s. The story has been done in dozens of different titled games. You are a great American crusader who tries to overthrow an evil dictatorship on a small island in the middle of no where. They still could have pulled off this cliche story if the writing wasn't done so poorly. Every mission was so predictable, oh it's quiet? I wonder if i'm going into an ambush?


Gameplay (3 out of 5 stars)

This was pretty fun but also got pretty dull at parts. There are only seven story missions in this game, if you lined them up back to back then it'd only be about five or six hours long of a game. So what do they do? They add in dozens of different tasks you must do to even unlock the story missions; side missions and destroying stuff. At times it was pretty fun to fly into a military base all Rambo style and start destroying everything, but each thing you destroyed would award about 500 chaos points only which is what you need to unlock missions. You need a total of 435,000 chaos points to unlock all of the missions. So you have to destroy a LOT of things and do a LOT of side missions which are all pretty similar; catch someone fleeing, hunt down someone, destroy something, take over strongholds. The stronghold takeovers were the highlight of the grind though, however there are only 9 of them as opposed to 49 side missions. The big downfall of this game is that it forces you to do side tasks unlike every other open world game (GTA, Dragon Age, Skyrim, Fallout, etc.) The great thing about other open world games is that if I just want the story, then I can go do those missions right away. It took me about 19 hours or so to finish the game... I probably spent about 12 of those hours just unlocking the story missions. Once again I state, the side tasks were pretty fun but you just had to do way too many to progress.


Achievements (1.5 out of 5 stars)
These achievements weren't too hard to get, I never finished it because I can not bother sitting for another 12 hours to complete this game's achievements fully. They were mostly pretty generic; progress through the story, kill X amount of people by doing -insert task here-, find X amount of an object, Discover X amount of towns. However there were a few pretty unique ones; base jump 1000 meters, parachute climb 300 meters, fly a plane under 30 different bridges, and fly a plane close to the ground for 30 seconds. Those were pretty fun to unlock/attempt to unlock. But considering the fact that there are FIFTY achievements in the game, four cool achievements won't do it for me.

Great game over all, but there is some down points. Racing is the same as the 1st, Base Jumping challenges is a epic fail. I like the new options they give you for a vehicle. But who would really use that El Camino looking vehicle, I mean there is absolutely no use for it. Collectibles is a everlasting fail again, I mean can i really play a game without collecting something. A good point, the story was great, even on the highest difficulty, BUT after its all done in order to get 1000gs on the game, its really run out and dry. Glitches are at minimum considering the 1st you needed to save every 5 minutes. So that is a positive.. Graphics are a A+ compared to the 1st, They fixed the clipping, the game doesn't freeze but you have a long loading time and your not constantly seeing polygons. Well that is all I have to say about, Amatsukami78 signing out.

This game is an epic single player game. you do missions, and cause chaos (blowin stuff up, killing the enemy). The grappling and parachute are truly awesome. Bolo santosi is truly unforgetable for her voice. Lots of places to explore, since huge map.
Now with all this good stuff, there are plenty of bad stuff, that limit the games potential.
A. There is no multiplayer! that made me so angry. It would have been really awesome to cause choas with friends in panau.
B. Black market is retarded. you have limited vehicles and guns. Wish there was bigger selection.
C. Faction takeover very repetetive (go in, open gate, kill guys, defend, win)

I had been looking forward to this game since I first played Just Cause and realized the potential the game had. Unfortunately the first was a critical failure but was still a great premise on an existing genre. Just take saints row 2, mercenaries 2, and the original just cause and mix them all together. Just Cause 2 is the result. Graphically far more superior than the first, it boasts a wide range of landscape from mountains to deserts to the classic jungle from the original. All beautifully detailed. Rico, the main character, also has a great deal of detail however the remaining characters could have used a little polish. Voice acting was also a little off beat at times but hardly noticeable.
Gameplay handles fairly nice once you learn to master the parachute and grapplinghook. Gunplay felt nice as well with an auto targeting system sometimes getting in the way.
The mere scope of the game makes up for any flaws this game may have. There is lots to do on the islands. Over three hundred locations and objectives in each one means if your going for a 100% it'll take quite sometime. Bottom line, Just Cause 2 is total unscripted fun and with beauty to match.