I play more video games than I should and far fewer than I would like to.
(In another life I would very much like to test the neo-Calvinist adage contending that “Nobody ever looks back on their lives and says ‘I wish I’d played more video games’.” Because, honestly, that’s bullshit. I absolutely wish I played more video games, and in a futuristic post-scarcity utopia that has dispensed with the necessities of food, shelter and providing for loved ones, I would jack myself into the X-Station 2600 Virtual Arcade before you could say “smelly otaku”.)
There are any number of things that will suck me into a game and keep me playing it, but number one on the list is a large world to explore. Open-world sandboxes are my crack cocaine, especially since I gave up crack for video games [1]. You give me a halfway decent map, some kind of firearm to see off roaming predators and enough hours in the day and I promise I won’t come up for breath for hours.
Which brings me to Just Cause 2.
JC2 is a first-person shooter by Avalanche Studios, in which you play Rico Rodriguez, a CIA operative infiltrating the vaguely-defined south-east Asian island nation of Panau in order to overthrow dictator Pandak ‘Baby’ Panay (whose towering statues hilariously adorn virtually every corner of the country). There are secret CIA plants, criminal factions and international enemy agents, not to mention an infinite supply of heavily-armed police and soldiers between you and the insane climactic showdown.
That’s the plot, but it’s breathtakingly irrelevant next to three things:
1) You can roam the entire vast map, consisting of one large and dozens of smaller islands, going anywhere you please and using any number of cars, motorbikes, planes, helicopters and boats to get there. If you have the patience, you can swim along any of the hundreds of rivers, bays and straits or climb every rambling snow-capped mountain. If you can see something on the map, you can make your way there somehow. And it might take you forever to uncover every town, village and roadside market – some of them are just not marked on the map. For intrepid explorers nursing mildly obsessive completists tendencies like myself, it’s a free-roaming paradise.
2) Related to Point 1, Rico spends a lot of time getting about with his personal transport gear, an improbably versatile parachute and a wrist-mounted grappling hook. Between them they elevate Just Cause 2 to a crazy thrill-seeker’s paradise. The parachute can be deployed and discarded at will, allowing for all sorts of ridiculous freefall stunts and lazy, sooth paragliding exploration. The grapple allows Rico to scale cliffs, yank unsuspecting enemies off roofs, hijack everything from motorbikes to helicopters to jet fighters, attach bad guys to moving cars (hilariously fatal!) and – almost best of all – safely arrest a terminal velocity skydive. The timing is tricky on that last one, but totally worth experimenting.
3) Nearly everything is susceptible to destruction by firearms, explosives or missiles, and ‘Baby’ Panay’s grip on his people can be broken if you just disrupt enough of his national infrastructure. Which means that Rico can cheerfully wander about the island blowing up everything from police cars to electrical transformers, from wind farms to oil refineries, from SAM installations to nuclear missile silos. Everything you destroy attracts the attention of Panau’s heavily-armed police force, though, so blowing up a power generator invariably leads to a crazily-escalating firefight.
I don’t know if I can adequately convey the sheer, manic glee of stumbling across some hidden Panauan army base, setting off a bunch of triggered explosives and then getting into a running firefight with a battalion of pissed-off soldiers and the helicopter gunships they call in for support. First-person shooters aren’t for everyone – and this one is both pretty violent and has some very questionable politics, not to mention its hilariously bad voice acting – but if you like to combine your touristy impulse to go everywhere and collect everything with your uncontrollable urge to commit acts of destructive mayhem, Just Cause 2 has you covered, quite possibly for the rest of your life. Just Cause 2 is the only shooter I’ve ever played that has tempted me to go back and try it on a harder setting (even though I am basically terrible at first person shooters and I have about half a dozen other games queued up on my system, unplayed).
Besides, it has a pointless and needlessly inaccessible reference to Lost, which just endeared it to me all the more.
JC2 is cheap in the Steam store. Get it, play it, and never leave the Island.
[1] Mum: I did not really give up crack. Not in my heart.