Just Cause 2 Overview

What’s your opinion on Just Cause 2?

It’s fun. The weapons are really accurate even if you don’t focus them, the combination of the grappling hooks and infinite parachutes feels really excellent, blowing up stuff attracting the military works pretty well, makes any spot on the map potentially a fight zone.

The story missions are generally rather linear and boring in comparison to free roam destruction. The faction missions are a bit better. Both do an alright job of breaking up the repetition of just going around the map and blowing stuff up, which isn’t very organized or focused, but story missions require a certain amount of chaos before you can do them. The trend kind of ends up being that you’re stuck grinding before the next story mission, which itself is more limiting in many cases and less fun than the open world stuff, but I at least feel the need to get to it, because that’s what progression is defined by. It would be nice if they tried a bit harder to give the player more open ended quests as just things that were going on across the world, rather than segregating them into their own mode. Especially because you can visit anywhere on the map, including mission locations, early and fuck them up in advance, making the missions easier. You might as well have the missions be more based around locations than becoming on-rails segments temporarily, it would all fit together better.

A number of the missions are pretty cool, like the one where you take down the missiles as they launch, or the island that’s a ripoff of lost, then you get components that are annoying like driving sections where you have to follow a single path and your vehicle controls like ass and the car is liable to blow up after getting shot too much.

Downsides are the limited number of weapons you can carry at once, really prevent use of the more exotic weapons and sometimes I was constantly running out of ammo.

Also the map is really big and travel to new locations can take a lot of time. You can only fast travel to places you’ve already been, so you need to invest a fair amount of time into going around the map so you can fast travel it later. Also it feels a bit more annoying than I think it should be to grab all the vehicle, weapon, and armor parts. On top of that you have cash stashes and faction collectibles all spread out across this massive massive map. This is completely filler, much like a ton of the smaller things you can blow up to get chaos are filler. If they didn’t have the heat mechanic bringing the military down on you all the time, then it would be completely uninteresting.

Running out of C4 and grenades sucks, because those are the primary things you use to blow up structures, however I think JC3’s decision to just make those unlimited was a poor decision, given that they’re some of your strongest tools. If they aren’t limited in some way, then you have no problem using them all the time on enemies. At that point you might as well scrap the ammo economy completely.

I feel like the C4 and Grenade shortages could be solved as a level design problem, or by having enemy drops, rather than just giving the player infinite.

Like overall I like the game because the movement is great, the shooting is pretty great, and the missions are generally pretty good too even though I harshed on them a bit. I feel like a ton of the game is built up as filler however rather than focusing the key aspects that make it interesting. You’re practically expected to sweep every area destroying every little thing, while picking up all the collectibles too and passing through large sweeps of land where there’s nothing inbetween the discoverable points. Having a completion counter that gives a bonus reward when you hit 100% is even more painful. Keeping the objectives more limited, or having a threshold where you automatically accomplish everything once you’ve done enough in an area would be a lot more tolerable. I think the design goal was really to drive up the play time by all means necessary, rather than consider whether the boring parts overstayed their welcome or not.

Other things that would help would be a bit more enemy variety. The ninjas are nice, but they’re introduced late in a story mission and I think they only show up in story missions (wiki check says yes). Otherwise most enemies are just footsoldiers with hitscan weapons.

Also I was apparently only 2 missions off from completing the main story. Damn. Might need to finish that.

Probably the most enjoyable open world game I’ve played, despite the faults.

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