PC Game Review: Just Cause

When I saw that Eidos Interactive, who simultaneously cured my Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion addiction and sparked my Tomb Raider: Legend addiction, was taking a crack at a sandbox-style shoot-em-up called Just Cause, I got a little tingle in my bottom.

I usually find that if I like one game by a particular publisher, I tend to like most of them. So I plunged headlong into the life and times of our hero Rico Rodriguez, a smooth-talking and damn-near-indestructible CIA black ops agent.

In this first installment of Rico’s exploits, he’s busting up the corrupt regime of Salvador Mendoza (sorta like Manuel Noriega, a demagogue of a country sorta like Panama, in a game whose name sorta sounds like Operation Just Cause, the United States’ invasion of Panama - does anyone see a connection here?)

Let me start by saying - this game isn't for everyone. Those who fiercely love the beautiful aesthetic of Half-Life 2 and its ilk will be disappointed in these fairly low-res textures and inferior (but still respectable) polygon counts.

Those who adore the ultra-realism of game engines like Doom 3 and Source will shudder at the ridiculous ways that objects move in this game. And those who long for epic storylines of grand proportion will go hungry.

But those who want to shoot and punch people, drive fast cars, fly cool planes and choppers and blow a bunch of shit up - welcome to paradise.

Things to-do: Just Cause offers a fairly limited to-do list, which can get a little repetitive, especially if you’re not enjoying the shoot/drive/fly/blow up formula as much as I do. They consist of:

• Completing the main storyline, which consists of 21 segments that weigh in at a light 8-10 total game hours
• Wresting control of cities, villages and crude settlements from the hands of the regime, which involves alternate rounds of killing soldiers and destroying roadblocks, followed by a mad dash to capture the village flag.
• Wresting control of remote settlements from the hands of the Montano drug cartel and into the hands of the Rioja drug cartel, in a similar fashion outlined above.
• Completing simple side missions for either the guerillas or Rioja.
• Completing "collection" missions which involve many, many hours piloting a helicopter.

But with the variety of fun, albeit utterly unrealistic tools at your disposal, how you complete each mission is often more compelling than the mission itself. A single village takeover might involve a skydive into the heart of town, blowing up some propane tanks to take out a few dozen troops, hijacking a tank to blow up a roadblock, and hopping out to mow down soldiers in the street with a machine gun, and jumping into a nearby jeep to speed towards the flag capture.

Article Author: Timothy Moriarty

By day, Timothy Moriarty asks rich people to give their money to nonprofits. By night, he is the proprietor of the blog hurling invective dot com.

Visit Timothy Moriarty's author page — Timothy Moriarty's Blog