Spending the weekend with Just Cause 2 feels like the videogame equivalent of the days when children received live ammunition as Christmas gifts, unleashed on the neighborhood to a world of seemingly limitless possibilities. Reaching for a more reasonable explanation, it was a very short ride through the fixed narrative opening before I was free to fly a jet fighter over the island of Panau, able to jump out of said plane and enter into a free fall, activating the parachute just as the buildings below slowly shifted into focus, and then proceeding to spray targets on the ground with machine gun fire. And within moments I was being attacked by a helicopter gunship, which I then grappled onto, taking out the crew and using the chopper to finish the job I’d started.
The short of it is that whatever you’re doing in Just Cause 2 has the curious ability to make the previous outrageous action seem boring in comparison. So the game is filled with opportunities for self-fulfilling over-saturated hyper-violence – and God help me I like it. The “it only does everything” nature of the game is the focus of the PR push and essentially what the back of the box conveys.
And yet it’s the little things that pulled me into taking a longer vacation in Panau. The little things are the spice of life after all, and Just Cause 2 has more than enough to prove itself a zesty game taco among the sandbox set.