You are Rico Rodriguez, the Agency’s best operative. In the first few minutes of the game, you are thrown from a plane and freefall hundreds of meters, infiltrating the island nation of Panau with the sole purpose of causing as much chaos as possible. In doing so will hopefully lure out an Agency renegade by the name of Tom Sheldon. Just Cause 2 is an intense action game that at times may be over the top and corny but when it comes down to it, one of the best action games I’ve played.

When I said the game was all about causing chaos, I wasn’t joking. The actions you do are converted to “chaos points.” When you fill the chaos meter, you will unlock new Agency missions, Gang Stronghold takeovers, and weapon and vehicles in the Black market. How do you acquire chaos you might ask, ohhh it’s quite simple really, you do just about anything from blowing up cars, killing military officials, destroying strongholds, gang missions, military bases, finding black boxes, skulls, and drug drops, challenges, races, the list just goes on and on. Your actions of course will not go un-noticed. After causing enough chaos, the military will come after you, and simply the more chaos you commit, the more they will send to kill you.

The map is down right HUUUUGGGEEEE, roughly 1000 square kilometers, meaning that no matter how long you play this game you’ll find new areas to explore. Sprinkled throughout are many villages and cities, races, collectibles, and the Lost Island (a very fun mission that I wont spoil). Additionally there are government military strongholds that can be taken over, in doing so adds to your Chaos and gives you some more money. In addition to its size is its great beauty. The graphics in this game are quite crisp. From the desert, to the jungle, to the cities, and even the snow-capped mountains, all of it is dazzling.

The black market can be called upon any time, where you can upgrade and purchase vehicles and weapons in addition to a very convenient fast travel. Different crates are scattered all throughout Panau. There are weapon, vehicle, armor, and cash. Vehicle and weapon crates accumulate and when you have enough, you can upgrade your vehicles and weapons respectively. Then for every 5 Armor crates you find, your max health increases, and then finally cash crates give you $2000 per crate.

Speaking of health, I personally found the health system a little weird. You have a typical health bar where you lose health the bar will decrease. However the bar is split into 3rds, and say when your health falls to half way, it will only heal to the 2/3rds checkpoint, and when you are on your last point of health, it will only heal to the 1/3rd mark. Some firefights get pretty hairy, as you’ll lose health relatively quickly and always found myself in the last pie of health. There are health packs scattered around that will restore you to full health, so rest assured death isn’t imminent.

This game sports some great action game features that I think have never been done so well before. From the very beginning, you have a parachute and a grappling hook. The grappling hook can latch on to anything within 100 yards and zip you there and the parachute you can open up after just about any jump. Using these two in unison allows for you to travel around easily as you can use the grappling hook while the parachute is open. The grappling hook alone can provide hours of amusement as you zip around the island feeling like Spiderman. Another tweak that makes the game fun is that while doing your crazy Spiderman maneuvers, you don’t take any falling damage, UNLESS, you are free falling and able to take you parachute out, and even then you can still fall quite a distance and still live.

Of course there are many more methods of transportation besides the parachute. There are 104 vehicles in the game that consist of Cars, trucks, motorcycles, mopeds, boats, helicopters, planes, fighter jets, and even a commercial airline jet. While the ground vehicles are nice for doing local missions, the map is actually so large that only air vehicles and fast traveling are the only convenient forms of transportation. An awesome mechanic is that you are able to hijack and vehicle. To do so just grappling hook yourself onto any car and this will start a little button mashing mini-game, be warned though that you must kill all of the other passengers before you can start the mini game.

The combat system is a typical 3rd person shooter. Weapons, as long as vehicles and a fast travel option, can be called upon using a PDA and both the weapons and vehicles can be upgraded to increase their efficiency. There aren’t too many different weapons, there are 2 handguns, 2 shotguns, 2 assault rifles, a sniper rifle, a submachine gun, a rocket launcher, and a grenade launcher. There’s also a dual wielding mechanic, but I found it to drain ammo too quickly. One issue I felt like I had though was I was constantly running out of ammo. I always found myself using the standard pistol because it seemed like my enemies mostly used pistols, and therefore would drop ammo for it. However, this was because I was too stingy to spend the easily acquired cash to buy ammo for my weapons. There are also grenades and C4 that can be used. While I never personally used the C4 that much, I found the grenades highly useful and upgraded them as much as possible.

The story is a little lackluster. I don't want to get into too many details but in no way is it bad, just kind of odd. The story is even further "enhanced" by the atrocious voice acting. I've heard of some bad voice acting but this takes the cake, but it's so bad that it actually becomes good in my opinion, even quite humorous. The end of the game was even better with the craziest and most over the top ridiculous Boss fight. Once you beat the main story, you enter Mercenary Mode. In Mercenary mode, the game even tells you that there’s no more story behind it, just Chaos. The goal now is to try to 100% complete the game, which is quite challenging. Even after the entire story, which took me about 27 hours of game time to finish, I was still only 44% done with the game.

Now you might ask, is this game worth it? I say yes. While at times this game may seem a little repetitive, there’s just so much to do that even if you may get bored of it, you can always come back to this game later and have the same fun. I give this game an 8 out of 10 and while I traded a few games to John for Just Cause 2, I would buy this game new. Solid game play and crazy fun action, the downfall though is the repetitiveness of destroying bases. When destroying bases, the goal is to destroy key items, such as generators, radio towers, water towers, etc while also finding the upgrade chests. While it is easy to find the chests through the radar device, finding some of the destroyable things are infuriating as you’ll be at 99% destroyed, yet you can’t find the last item.

In our podcast, we discussed how some games don’t need a multiplayer, but I think this game could have an awesome multiplayer. By utilizing different areas of the map, there could be some crazy fun CTF, or other objective based games and while I don’t think the game hurts from a lack of a multiplayer, I think it could have been seriously considered.

Thanks for reading, and sorry for taking so long to begin writing reviews. Lance recently showed me how to post so I hope to write many more articles.