While I do prefer games to have a great story and be focused on what they do, sometimes you just need a playground of one sort or another. If you want your playground to be a third-person action kind of thing, full of ridiculous combat and over the top stunts, then Just Cause might just grab some of your attention - and if even has a story, should you want to pursue it.
The island of San Esperito is run by a dictator that needs to be overthrown, and you're just the man to help get things moving, Agency operative Rico Rodriguez, channelling as much Antonio Banderas as he can muster.
Will this island paradise end up tourist-friendly? Let's find out.
Fun Times
Just Cause doesn't mess around with long introductions or boring setups. You're hired to overthrow a dictator, get your arse over here already, I don't care if it means jumping out of a plane. And so you do. Sailing through the skies of a lovely sun-soaked island paradise towards your contact on the beach below, Sheldon (not Sully).
This game is an open world, and very open it is too. This beach is sparsely dotted with details but vehicle after vehicle of armed troops slides into the action for you to deal with. You're equipped with dual pistols and infinite ammo for them, and with Sheldon forming a distraction somewhere else on the beach, you're able to flank around and cap countless soldiers with all the ease and grace of a videogame protagonist with no care for his health.
That was an awful simile, but I was running around in the open with no care about my health because it felt like I was somewhat invincible. I'm sure I wasn't, but that's the kind of impression you get from Just Cause - that you and everything you do is ridiculous, so just go for it.
Sheldon takes us on a road trip that serves as our explosive introduction to the island. We don't know where we're going, but it's full of open roads, incoming threats, and plenty of explosions. Reaching a roadblock that needs clearing, I hop out and take out every target one by one, somehow staying alive in a situation I most definitely shouldn't have.
I thought I had to jump into this digger, but no. It seems I was to use these most-likely explosive barrels. I should have guessed that before spending all that time shooting the guards, eh? Oh well. We've plenty of game left to learn that.
Our journey eventually concludes in the depths of a forest, or jungle, or some combination of the two, in a secluded shack that serves as our home base. This is where we can get ammo for the other weapons we'll find and pick up that don't have infinite rounds, a health top-up, and a save point, as well as where we'll get mission briefings. It's won't be as simple as just killing a dictator.
Our first mission is to befriend the leader of the rebel forces - by breaking him out of prison. Seems a little bit extreme for a first mission, doesn't it? A whole prison? I've not even learned the controls yet. A look of the map pinpoints our objective, along with many other points of interest along the way.
I'm using the keyboard and mouse for Just Cause, which means I'm playing the PC version. I can't imagine how this game would even run on the PlayStation 2, but it got a release there as well, so it must have managed it somehow. It's a bit fiddly to navigate these PDA menus without a controller, personally, but it's not like you'll be spending hours staring at the map, is it?
There was a dirt bike at the base, and given that this is an open world where you are free to approach everything as you like, I hop on and try to get a grip of the controls. It's responsive, to a point. If it's going straight, you're fine. If you need to turn, be prepared for a spin and a stop. Maybe I just don't know how to drive motorbikes with WASD controls.
The game actually feels like a slick Hitman, which is nice. There's probably a better game to compare the feel too, but that's recency bias for you.
It wouldn't be an island paradise open world if you weren't able to pilot speedboats, would it? There's an alarming amount of bloom (welcome to the mid-2000s in video gaming), but Just Cause seems to hold up well enough. Then again, it does feel particularly empty, so it's not like it's rendering huge amounts of stuff. Perhaps that's what the bloom is for - obscuring the view.
Find yourself on top of the world looking down on your objective, though, and no amount off bloom can put you off. That's a big prison. How on Earth are we meant to approach that as a one-man army?
The front door would be suitably bad-ass, but I don't want this run to end quite so soon. The piers at the back offer a subtler approach, I'm sure. Time for a swim. Good job Rico can do pretty much anything.
Frustrations
Sneaking around the back, there's an obvious lookout post that will probably see me coming, so I line up a headshot to deal with it. Ten or so shots later, some of which definitely produced spurts of blood, and one of which took out the spotlight for an added bonus, and the guard was finally down. He didn't raise the alarm, so far as I could tell, and didn't bother shooting back. Did he just not believe he was being repeatedly shot at or something?
This prison is incredibly welcoming. If my understanding of the HUD is correct - and I've not been told by Just Cause what it is that I'm looking at yet - we've got the equivalent of a two-star wanted level in Grand Theft Auto. Shooting our way into prison, remember. Maybe this was a good first mission after all.
We need to work our way through it to find our rebel leader, but giant red markers hovering over his head all the way up to the clouds makes that easy enough.
Run and gun was the order of the day here, and according to the day/night cycle, it took a while for us to bust him out of prison, at which point he disappears and tells me to meet up with him back at a rebel camp. Surely, in an open-world game, the next part of the 'bust him out of prison' mission would be 'escort him safely back to camp'.
I mean, we finally have a level 5 alert over our heads. We're definitely wanted men now. Are we just going to have to find our own way back, in our own time? Well, with a combination of boats and stolen police vans, we do just that. We find our own way back to camp. No teleporting to safety for us.
You've really got to keep an eye out for that threat level because so little of the world tells you what state you're in. Yeah, guards will pull up and shoot you, but you wouldn't know that until you saw them. They're not shown on the radar, like GTA titles. Technically it's not a radar, one might argue, and I can understand that point of view, but it feels like Just Cause isn't fully fleshed out, in some sense.
There's a lot of systems in play and lots of freedom for the player. Shall we pull them together a little and channel them in the early game? No, no. Just... let 'em loose. See what happens, eh?
In the space of a few sentences, we meet with the rebel leader and watch him drive off. I don't know when I'll see him again. I don't know where he's going. Whatever. My mission was a success, what do I care?
Further Fun Times
We're now pointed to some rebels hanging around some small towns, ready to liberate them from government control. Liberating a town will make the area safer, and give you more supplies and whatnot, and I suspect the game will be heading towards 'liberate everything' at some point, so why not start now?
These missions have you destroy a bunch of barricades and kill an awful lot of soldiers before finally being able to raise your flag and declare the town free. You're given grenades for the first mission, and C4 for the second. They're both quite explosive if you don't position yourself right.
Side missions will increase your standing amongst various groups on the island, and this first assassination mission would go on to show just how weird an open world like Just Cause can get.
My target isn't too far away, but a helicopter has been hovering in the skies for a while, shooting at something. Turns out it was shooting - incredibly ineffectually - at my target, who was standing in the middle of the beach, thoroughly distracted by this helicopter.
I don't know who was piloting that helicopter, or what group my target was a part of, but that side mission was done and I didn't really want to get distracted by any more right now. Time to progress the story.
We're going to pretend to be someone, and meet up with some group or other to help fund their efforts, because while they're not rebels, they're not in support of El Presidente either, so it's all fine. To be honest, I wasn't following along at this point. We're just sort of causing a bit of chaos, but it's targetted chaos. Precision chaos. Chaos with a purpose.
Bombing it across the countryside as fast as I could, I get to the airfield where my target is landing, but he's already in a car and an escort convoy heading into the city.
I get off to the best of starts by turning over and watching them drive away. That's annoying. And because this is an open-world affair, there aren't exactly any checkpoints to return to, should you make a mistake. No, you've got to use the tools you have available and make the best of them.
And we've just got hold of quite a fancy grappling hook.
While fiddly to equip, once you do, you can fire it at a car and parasail behind it, altering your distance to and from the vehicle as you see fit. It can allow you to float above the action and rain down destruction from above, or you can zip down and kick the driver out of their seat, taking the car for yourself.
Fiddle with the 'F' and 'E' keys, or the spacebar and another grappling hook shot, or any combination of them all - to be honest, my actions at this point where too much of a fluke to make sense of - and you can hop between vehicles, taking over whatever target makes sense.
In the chaos (I know it's now an overused word for this post, but nothing else describes it), my target leaps from his vehicle and was subsequently run over, completing that part of the mission. I was now, just like that, him. And he needed to attend a meeting in town, not dick around in a firefight.
Further Frustrations
I don't know what this city is called, but it's big and it is empty. Cars drive through, citizens stumble along the sidewalks. There's life here, but not much of it. It reflects the rest of Just Cause, in that enough is going on to give you the impression of a living island full of possibility, but just barely.
Technical limitations to blame, I'm sure, and views perhaps in part distorted by knowing what sequels and more modern titles are capable of. It's open is many senses of the word. This city is so open that it seems to take me hours just to run to the other side.
Does time have any meaning on this island? Arrive at night, cutscene in the blazing midday sun. I think we've just given a bunch of cash to a drug cartel. They'll be giving me more missions to do to help liberate the island even more, though they're not as rebellious as the rebels, of course.
Will we be walking a fine line between helping both groups? Are we going to end up helping one at the expense of the other? Do we get to decide fates, or are we just a cog in the machine, just moving things along until El Presidente has gone?
I have no idea and, if I'm being honest, I'm not sure I ever will.
Final Word
Just Cause is clearly ambitious, and for that, it should be praised because it does deliver. You are free to go about your days in so many ways, and the game does it's best to keep up. The 1001 list jokes that it fails to do so, and even contains strange bugs if you're unfortunate enough to encounter them - yet this all works in Just Cause's favour, to some extent.
It's clearly a game that is more about having a good time despite stumbling performance issues or silly bugs. You can call in vehicle drops to help you get around the island quicker, and these can fall on your head and kill you. Rather stupid, but equally charming. Could you set them up to fall on a target, like you could in Metal Gear Solid V? Maybe, if you're that determined as a player.
Just Cause's parasailing grappling hook mechanics make for overly elaborate dances of death in later games in the series, especially in skilled hands, much like in-depth knowledge of Hitman systems make for ridiculous kills in those games.
The game, then, is more of a creative tool than a story to play through. Who cares about overthrowing a dictator? I don't. But can I have fun getting from point A to point B, and cause absolute carnage when I get there, just because I can?
Just 'cause I can... Don't tell me that's the reason for the title...
Don't go into Just Cause thinking it's as polished as its sequels, because it isn't. But as first attempts go, even if I'm not really entertaining the thought of playing much more myself, I can see how it's entertaining nonetheless.
Like Far Cry, but without every enemy knowing where you are within a second of being discovered, Just Cause gives you an island paradise to play around in as you see fit. Preferably working towards a goal of some sort, but eh, no matter if you don't, I suppose.
Strap on your grappling hook and just have a bit of fun.
Fun Facts
The map is supposedly just under 400 square miles in size. Maybe that's why we need blurry speed lines at the sides of the screen when in a vehicle. It'd feel smaller without them.
Just Cause, developed by Avalanche Studios, first released in 2006.
Version played: PC, 2006.