Just Cause (2006)

I know what you're thinking - tanks are fun! They are, but not if you want to complete this game. Here are some random thoughts from my playthough:

• This physics engine is soooooooooo broken
• Oh no my tank has gone into boogie wonder tank mode and went flying off the map
• Wtf, who let the tanks shoot at me while on foot. I know I do that to them, but isn't it illegal to do it the other way around?
• Aw man I got stunlocked being shot by a tank
• If it weren't for cheap deaths, I'd be invincible
• I can't believe I have to fight alongside communists!
• The minimap does one thing my car's GPS can't do - change zoom level based on speed
• Majority of the Montano/Rioja takeover is filler - every single base is exactly the same
• The gyrocopter is way faster than it should be
• I played about 90% of the game in near silence due to the music being mixed far too quietly
• If I ever meet the guy who's selling coco frescos, I'm gonna beat him over the head with one
• I still have no idea how I can fly a helicopter up as high as it'll go, and yet someone can still shout in my ear "stop! this is the policia!"
• The only reason the devs made the off road areas into minefields of impassable rocks must've been to piss people off who wanted to take a shortcut

Oh well. Time to go play a better Just Cause.

An amazing start for a franchise that will quickly become an unavoidable classic. The map is huge, weapons are varied, gunfights are both epic and funny, scenario is decent. However your character, Rico, can take an incredible amount of bullets without dying while being rolled on the corner of the foot by a car launched at 20km/h sends him instantly into the other world. All the characters of this game are overacting. Women only appear for their huge assets, just as if the players were needy heterosexual males.

Vehicles are way too slow for the size of the map. The major thing you will do while playing this game is driving from point A to point B, avoiding multiple cars on the way. Plus some missions only requires to drive even more. Sometimes you wanna cut through jungle to get to destination faster but you will surely end up getting blocked by trees, rocks or impassable climbs. So the game makes sure you take the correct and extremely long route. Physics are broken. The save option is awful since you must reach some dumb computer in order to save your game. But it's still playable and sometimes funny in spite of itself.

To think I played this last of all the Just Cause games; it shows that the first title has fulfilled most of its vision and yet, it missed the mark that time. It's more of a GTA clone with only a few features to show for, including a vast island landscape, factions to fight and serve for perks, parachuting stunts and a grappling hook with more limited usability.

It only misses some essential features that would make the following sequels much more appealing; there's only jungle terrain with barely any variation, side missions that get stale pretty quickly and there's too little impact I get from combat scenes.

The developers have certainly come a long way to perfect the formula in Just Cause 2, both aesthetically and gameplay-wise! I wouldn't recommend this game to players new or familiar to the franchise but with all due respect, it served as a ramp up to the mayhem success of the sequels that followed. Skip this one and start with Just Cause 2 instead.

The deed is done and the game is finished.

To be honest I have no idea why I did set up on a quest to finish this game. It's probably due to the fact that when I first got it I had too slow PC to play it and the promise of the game seemed quite exciting. And so now in 2018 I've finally get to "enjoy" it.

The game's a mess. From outdated visuals, inability to set up proper config, meaningless story to clunky mechanics. The game just does justify time you need to set up to play it.

So from the top - I could not get proper video settings up. Meaning I was forced to play it in 4:3 format and 1280xsomething resolution. The game does look bad like that. The models are simple, the colours melt together - it's so hard to spot an enemy.

The cutscenes are junky, barely able to hold even 30fps. Terrible models terribly animated.

The game itself feels like a wasted potential. The idea is quite nice - open world tropical islands. A dictator to overthrow, guerrillas, corrupted police - the standard. In all of that - you - a US spy/commando doing all the dirty work.

The story is simple and has no impact on sequels so not really worth playing for continuation. There's quite a few interesting mechanics introduced. Being able to stand on a car, parachute of it, use a hook to catch another transport, board it mid-flight sets up abilities for quite nice action sequences.

However it's all clunky. It doesn't work exactly as you'd like it. Key binding are not to obvious and the for example keys to open parachute differ when doing it from freefall and while on a car's roof. The harpoon gun sometimes hits, sometimes doesn't. It can break as well on random it feels. The car driving is a bit floaty. The shooting mechanics are a little off as well. It's specifically noticeable on town liberations.

The game itself is both super easy and very hard. One trick you learn pretty soon is - running makes you almost invincible. So as long as you run you'll be just fine. If you try to do it any other way - you're setting yourself for failure. In the end I've found two types of missions - one when you need to run at all the times shoot and when that's not enough - you need to hijack a helicopter and deal with mission.

Played through all the mission levels and in some masochist ways enjoyed a little bit of it.

Overall an outdated game that's better avoided completely.

You can read all over a bunch of reviews about how bad this game is, how it hasn't aged well, so as with most of my reviews this is really just notes for me so when I look back in 10 years I can remember.

For some reason I felt compelled to play this game as part of a Just Cause run, catching up on series I haven't played. It was fun for the first couple of hours, I can forgive aging graphics and just awful physics engines. And when it stopped being fun... I couldn't stop. The completionist in me had to finish even though I read that it affected the story line about zero amount. Ugh.

And then, after you beat it all, clear the drug cartels, the camps, and finish the game, you are rewarded with "congratulations you beat the game". I wish I had my time back. It's salt to the wound that I knew it was going to be like this too. Why on earth did I keep playing?