	Just Cause
	Developer: Avalanche Studios Publisher: Eidos Release Date: Out Now Players: 1	Words By:
Although the recent release of the similar Saint’s Row may look like the 360’s San Andreas it didn’t really blow us away. Hopefully Just Cause will be a little more complete and challenging… Just Cause is set on the island of San Esperito, which has loads of smaller islands surrounding it. You play as Antonio Banderas-a-like Rico Rodriguez; a CIA operative brought in to overthrow the corrupt government and install a US-friendly one. But you’re not alone; you get help from a guy who looks suspiciously like Joe Don Baker (the fat guy who helps Bond in Goldeneye) and a bevvy of Hispanic beauties drawn to black shirts and stereotypical Latino charm. Your mission starts being thrown from the back of a cargo plane, skydiving towards Earth with the “Whoosh” of the wind in your ears. You can see from the beginning that the world Avalanche have created is huge. We’re not talking about a few city blocks joined by bridges with loading in-between: there are no loading times when travelling normally whatsoever. Yes, you heard me right; there’s not even the painful stuttering between areas that got a bit annoying in Oblivion! The landscape is quite varied; huge freeways wrap around hills, connecting small villages to large cityscapes. SE has its own prisons, power plants, airports and dozens of secret installations and villas you can check out. The majority of the space is filled with dense jungle littered with trees, vines and rocks, so it’s best to stick to the roads if you can. You can nick cars, trucks and mopeds as in the GTA games, but they handle completely differently to any game like this I’ve played yet. Every land vehicle has a good sense of weight and speed (or lack of) but are very twitchy when it comes to the steering. There is a delay between moving the stick and the car actually responding, which means at the beginning you spend all your time trying to compensate for the oversteer the game throws at you. Eventually you get used to it but it was one of the few control methods I could never really feel comfortable with. You can steal a wide array of helicopters, planes and boats too; all of which handle better than the land vehicles – these are great fun to use (and most come with guns!), although the planes are very hard to land as they don’t seem to want to fly slowly without dropping out of the air like bricks. One of JC’s original ideas to bring to the table is the inclusion of stunts. You’re introduced to this at the beginning with the skydive onto the island but the use of your parachute is essential to getting around and completing missions easily in JC. For example: instead of stealing a car and driving through the gates of a prison you could nick a plane, fly over the prison, jump out the cockpit and skydive to the objective. Or you could ride a motorcycle to the gate and deploy your parachute at the last minute, pulling you into the air and above the guards. The parachute is only part of the stunts (albeit an integral one) but instead of just being for giggles it actually makes the game much more open in the way you can approach missions. When you’re given the grappling hook you can grab a tow from a car, boat or chopper and parasail around the island, or just hop onto the vehicle and jump in! Although there are plenty of ways to complete the missions there aren’t all that many to keep you busy; if you ignore the side missions it could be over in half a dozen hours or so. The side missions are for two factions: the Rioja drug cartel and the Guerrilla fighters. The Guerrilla missions involve aiding uprisings in different provinces of SE and “Liberating” them from the Government. After that you can do some smaller side missions. Each mission adds respect points which unlock safehouses all over the island with different weapons at each. Unfortunately it sounds much more complex than it actually is; the uprisings just involve blowing up some barricades and swapping a flag over (every time) and the side missions just repeat themselves if you play them enough. There’s only so many times you can fetch a briefcase/kill an official/hijack a truck before you get bored. You don’t really need to do the Guerrilla missions and the Rioja missions are exactly the same, except you retake a villa rather than a province! Doing the side missions to unlock safehouses would make sense if you needed the weapons to complete the main missions or if getting across the island was impractical but the game makes things way too easy for you. With regards to moving around the islands if you can’t be arsed to drive/fly anywhere you can call for an extraction, which drops you at the next mission objective (or safehouse), somewhat negating the point of multiple safehouses! The main missions never really get that tough either, mainly because of the simplistic auto-aim system; this ensures that if you’re looking at an enemy and holding down the trigger you’re definitely going to kill him. That and any mission involving blowing up/killing anything is easy when helicopter gunships are readily available! Just titting around the island was fun for a while; it’s amazing to take a jet, fly as high as you can go and just hop out and enjoy the view for a minute or two. But after playing so many games like San Andreas and (to an extent) Oblivion I find the “hours of free gameplay” a bit of a lazy way to extend the longevity without putting effort into important things such as varied missions that last longer than a day. The biggest flaw with JC has to be its greatly skewed sense of reality and realism. One minute you’ll be driving along and come to a dead stop after colliding with another car or even a picket fence; another you’ll be flipping from the cockpit of a helicopter to the tail fin - going through the blades!. The mechanics of the game seemed to be tilted to make the stunts look good without any regard for all that is good and holy in the world of physics, but over-compensate with things like jumping, running and driving, all of which are painfully annoying. Although it’s not to the extent of the farce that was Saints Row programming JC feels like an incomplete game. The synching at cut-scenes is pretty far-off, making the Ken doll-like mannequin characters look even more stupid. Little things like helicopters in regular spawn points on their sides and planes placed on runways of about 5ft with nowhere to taxi to highlights rushed work on behalf of the developers; throwing in cars and helicopters any old how so they can get down the boozer sharpish. Just Cause is a good sandbox game with a lot of beautiful scenery to play about with. The easy difficulty, short lifespan and lack of anything truly clever that works makes it hard to recommend, though. Don’t worry folks, GTA IV isn’t that far away…