Just Cause 2

Mercs 2 didn't advocate base jumping and goofy (yet fun!) parachute physics, so Just Cause 2 has at two advantages right off the bat.

Just Cause 1 was one of my favourite games on the 360 when it came out. Flawed as hell but the sense of freedom and momentum really made it great for messing around for a few minutes every now and then. The sequel looks absolutely amazing, loving the new graphics engine and the fact that they seem to be focusing on making a vibrant world rather than an overly large one (Just Cause 1 suffered by having the biggest game world I've ever seen and not really having much to do in it).

I'm late to the 360 bandwagon. Worth picking up on the cheap I take it?
I have a friend around here who had a lot of fun jumping out of airplanes in that one.

I clicked on this link and thought they were making a sequel to the Sean Connery movie.

Texture wise it's pretty ugly, but it's got a nice visual vibe to it and the main missions are a hell of a lot of fun. One involves dirtbiking up a volcano to take out a brothel situated in the centre of it.

Plus the skydiving is amazing. Definitely worth it if it's cheap.

You can probably find it for 5-10 bucks used, and it's worth about that. Definitely a bunch of fun to be had but with all the superior sandbox games that have been released since then it's a bit hard to get back into.

Haha I remember the brothel-in-a-volcano mission.

It's a pretty generic sandbox game with a great use of 'chute and a kinda charming sense of humour.

I've always sworn it wasn't a bad first attempt for the developer considering how nice it looks. It's as Spike said though, the world's not exactly filled with variety. A sequel needs that, desperately.

No on-line co-op? No interest.

Had a blast with the preview code for this. It looks amazing, like seriously jaw dropping at times, although it seems to be about three times larger than the original map which could lead to some frustration when you inevitably crashland your fight jet/helicopter/jumbo jet into a forest.

The gunplay is a lot better this time and it's retained a lot of the great stuff from JUST CAUSE 1. You're still free to do missions in a ton of different ways. One assassination mission had me slowly working my way up a mountain and sniping my target in an adjacent building as he went for a cigarette break, my friend simply crashed a MIG into the heart of the base and shot the target through the heart with a grapple gun before attaching the line to the back of a truck and dragging his corpse through the nearest friendly village.

The 26th can't come soon enough.

Did they add on-line co-op?

No they did not, and you know they didn't.

I know that you know that I know.

This quote just sold this fucking game for me. It is on the top of my"Must Own" list

Demo's up for 360- http://marketplace.xbox.com/en-US/ga...0-00005343880d

Steam has the demo page up, but clicking on the download button does nothing yet. Should be working any minute now. Anyone trying the pc flavor, remember it's DX10 only.

EDIT: It's up, I just needed to restart Steam for the install to start, for some reason.

Noticed the demo pop up on the marketplace this afternoon. Holy crap!

Got into a scrape in a village and with my health bottoming out took a running jump off the cliff...and glided down into some valley with an oil refinery. Then proceeded to level the place. No way to really explore all the things possible in this with just the time the demo affords. The propane tanks (and they were everywhere!) will take some practice. Favorite moment in the demo so far: taking out one of the refinery cranes with a smartly parked buggy and a grenade. I tend to favor slow and resourceful assaults (but will gladly take advantage of over-the-top cinematic escapes!) and any game that encourages that as much as this does deserves a good go at.

I wasn't that enthusiastic about the first one, but this is just too much fun.

Very fun. Coolest moment - jumping onto the front of a jeep driven by baddies, capping the two ridding motorcycles off to the side, then turning around, shooting the baddie hanging out the side of the jeep shooting me, then capping the driver in the face, grabbing the jeep and driving off...

Looking forward to playing more tonight.

Judging by the demo, I'm probably buying this. Not on day one but definitely during a slower part of the year. Tethering guards together and pistol-whipping them to death is fun. So is shooting them into the air.

I need to mess around in the demo some more, but I found it to be a little underwhelming so far. Perhaps I need some more time to master the parachute controls or something. I think the game is fun, but not $60 worth of fun.

However, you've gotta give props to any game that lets you hang off the bottom of a helicopter or surf on the top of a small airplane. I hijacked a small plane, flew it to a base in the mountains, got onto the roof, and jumped off by inflating my parachute right before the plane slammed into a cliff face.

My problem with Just Cause has always been that it almost makes all the crazy stunts and stuff too easy. There's no sense of accomplishment when you pull something crazy off. If they toned the protagonist down from superman to just plain secret agent badass I think this game would be incredible.

I think I spent the entire demo timer just hooking guys on motorcycles driving by and then attaching the line to a car driving the opposite direction and howling as the guy gets violently yanked off his bike and dragged off into the sunset.

Driving controls feel kind of wonky this time out or I'm just remembering bikes handling better in the original, but the graphic updates are great, and the grappling hook is the best thing to happen to open-world sandbox games since drivable vehicles and super-powered leaps. Might not be a $60 purchase but absolutely grabbing this at some point.

I didnt enjoy JC1 much because I rarely end up hooked by any GTA like sandbox game.
However, in the 30 minutes of this demo, I hijacked a helicopter, flew it to a missile silo looking base, jumped out of the plane before it got hit by AA missiles, parachuted all the way down to the bottom of the silo, killed all guards with a grenade launcher, overloaded the silo's main computer, grapple gunned my way to the top of the missile as the silo started to explode, then jumped from the top of missile and parachuted to safety.
All that was missing was the 007 theme as the silo exploded behind me.

So yeah, it was fun as hell...although this being a James Bond VS a SPECTRE controlled island nation sandbox game would be even more fun.

PS: Also, blew up a construction crane, grappled gunned my way to its top as it fell down and parachuted from it before it fell. awesome.

It's pretty and lets you do some hilarious things, but there's nothing here to convince me it's not going to fall into the same pitfalls as the original - sparse, repetitive submissions, and floaty unresponsive controls.

Grapple's a wonderful little toy though.

I can't stop playing this demo. Since the 30 minute countdown doesn't start until you jump off that first cliff platform, I've spent some time dicking around the first area (practicing chaining short grapple leaps, etc) long enough so that it's nearly sunset when I start the demo clock. Taking out refinery pipelines and cranes is pretty spectacular after dark.

One thing I noticed, the Panauan Police have an incredible budget. There are thousands of them on the payroll, often hundreds based out of any hq building.

And is that Dick Cheney in the chopper during the demo ending trailer?

After playing the demo, I get the feeling that the developers may have poured all of their energy into crafting this huge and elaborate gameworld, but forgot to make a decent game. The on-foot controls are floaty, and the vehicles are only marginally better - and coming off Red Faction, the demolition stuff feels totally scripted. If the cinema dialogues are really that awful ("I'm going to ride him raw!," lol okay) and the controls are that shitty, then the non-stunt, non-exploration parts of this game might be unbearable.

I really liked the exploring and grappling, though. A seondhand purchase, for sure.

Be sure to hook someone to a propane tank before you shoot it. Big laughs.

Agreed. The graphics are incredible, there's a ton of fun stuff to do and I dig that they made the guy into a superman, but but all the destruction is completely scripted and underwhelming. I liked finding out that you could blow up that missile silo thing in that nearby base but it didn't really have any oomph behind it. Also not a fan of how people take dozens of bullets to finally die, though.

Tying people to those air cannisters and shooting it never gets old, though. Just have to see how varied the missions are for this one.

I've played the demo through about four or five times on the PC so far, and I'm still having a lot of fun. I haven't managed any of these "tie a guy to something" stunts yet, though. I'll have to give that a shot. Does that involve harpooning a guy when he's next to a cylinder/drum, or what?

Vehicle controls aren't great (especially cars), but I'm getting better.

During my last playthrough, I laughed pretty hard when a grenade went off too close to me in a guard tower, blasting me through the air in a specTACular cartwheel. That round ended early when I overloaded the gas pipeline and the game froze, probably from the sheer awesomeness of what it would have looked like to see the whole thing blow up real good.

I'll get this for the PC at some point, but not at full price. This demo's plenty of fun for now.

EDIT: This speedboat stunt video is amusing:
http://kotaku.com/5489502/stupid-spe...n-just-cause-2

This screams for co-op. [/overlord]

I've been biting my tongue, but yeah. The entire thing has a "wouldn't it be cool if my buddy TREVOR!!! was playing this with me! But alas ... no can has."

*solitary tear rolls down cheek*

I think everything I need from this game is in the demo.

I managed once, by sheer accident, to grapple two canisters rather than one and a guy, they proceeded to knot up around the guy and his jeep and the result was an especially pleasing explosion. Never been able to reproduce that one, even with some rather careful setting up.

What I do get often is, with shit at level 3 heat, throwing a grenade and then grappling myself right next to the damn thing.

That actually sounds really friggin' hysterical.

The PC version is $34 on GoGamer today.

So who bought this? The reviews seem to confirm my initial fears, but most of them underscore what a blast the island is to explore.

And, it has a Lost hatch!

I caved and traded some stuff in for this. Holy crap, is it big, and it's easily the best looking open world I've ever seen. The water refraction and wake effects are really amazing, especially given how detailed the (explorable) sea floors are. So much detail went into this.

The missions aren't anything to crow about, but they're not abysmal, either - they're just typical for sandbox games. The vehicles blow, but besides the occasional helicopter, you won't be using too many of them. Skippable cutscenes are thankfully skippable.

It still screams for co-op, but exploring the island is really fun so far. I'm still trying to figure out the best way to get around on foot - grappling up a tree and pitching off into a parachute drop seems ok, but you drop pretty fast in the chute. The game keeps telling me to slingshot with my grapple when I'm descending in my chute, but that seems to do nothing.

My only complaint about the on-foot movement mechanics is that, besides being floaty, the grapple has a bad habit of tagging you to the top edge of a building where you're not able to make the jump to the roof, so you have to do a piecemeal grapple dance until you're dangling from the roof ledge. I wish this guy could grab onto and hang from ledges, is all.

Ha ha. Same here, traded some stuff in and got nearly the full price. And yeah, the place is crazy huge. Thankfully you get a pretty good taste of the land right out of the gate. The parachute is still going to take some time for me to get a full handle on, especially zeroing in on a target and grappling on to it.

An occasional problem I'm trying to cure is, in the heat of a firefight, grappling the guys and yanking them off their feet rather than pulling myself over and planting myself right in their faces.

Honestly, between the dialogue cutscenes, the fact that some of these guys take a full clip to paste and the sheer amount of exploding barrels and propane tanks, I get a mid-80s Mark Lester film vibe. Seems intentionally parodic. Then again, maybe that's what I'm bringing to it. Dropping a Power Station song on the player helps.

Fun game, though. And you're roght, it looks gorgeous.

Totally. I keep thinking that Rico Federico whatever-his-name-is is a near 80's action movie villain cutout. They should have called him Mendoza. I get a kick out of him muttering 'Oh, whatever!" when he hijacks a civilian vehicle. What a queen!

Glad they unlock the mini-jet early. You really need the aircraft. I spent a good fifteen minutes moving from the first militia escort mission to the second one even though the map makes it look like they're right on top of each other.

Did you ever find and catch that giant floating zeppelin party barge? I kept trying to hijack it to little (read: hilariously disastrous) results.

I love that the PS3 version lets you keep recording video, and upload the last 30 seconds to Youtube with the click of a button. Get to see some fun stuff like this that way- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTVDMo9nRxU

There are a few good ones up already, like the guy who straps a sports car to an airliner and whirls it around the island. Maybe the first time I haven't regretted buying the PS3 version of a multiplatform game.

Just Cause 2 hits the same part of my brain that last year's Prototype did, although I can see getting way more mileage out of this.

So something glitched and my character is frozen. I can move around but I can't look around with the right stick, shoot or jump. There's also no sound. And since I've been using an autosave, it looks like I'm completely fucked, cause it loads right up into it.

I take it you tried killing yourself?

Yep. Even tried quitting out of the mission I was currently on, turned on and off the system, jammed on all the buttons, etc. Fun bug.

Are you stuck in the scenery? Ugh, that blows. Good reminder to keep save files, I guess.

I have one save file that's a few hours of gameplay old, but fuck if I want to go back to that. Not stuck in the scenery- I can still get around! Barely. But not being able to look up or down or shoot things messes the experience up just a little bit.

It might actually be worth a phone call. Maybe they can open up some sort of debug mode, or maybe you just had some weird shit equipped or some obscure grapplemode turned on.

Probably not. Hi there, PS3!

Hah! I tried loading up the save game I had and the same thing is happening! Also, there are no health meters or any other on-screen indicators. This is fun!