“Just too unbelievable to be taken seriously.”
Honestly, I wanted to like this game. I really did. These free roaming third person shooter games are of my favorite genres, but there’s just something about this game that didn’t click. I literally had to force myself to play it, and wouldn’t have played it if I didn’t have a review to write.
Starting out, the story is awful. After about 10 missions in, I still wasn’t sure what in the world was going on. You are Rico Rodriguez, a CIA agent who specializes in toppling governments (those exist?). For some reason, you are sent to a lush, tropical island with the mission of crumbling the Mendoza regime. That’s about all I managed to get.
The audio in the game is pretty sad. All of the land and sea vehicles sound exactly the same, and the air vehicles don’t really seem to give off much of a sound at all. The voice acting is awful, with the stereotypical US warmonger from the south giving Rico intel and his hotheaded blonde assistant hating your guts, all the way to Rico himself, the voice acting is terrible. No emotion and tons of one liners just aren’t any fun to constantly hear.
The graphics are average. The character models are bland and boring. See one person, and see them all. The cutscenes are downright terrible. I’m really not sure why Eidos can’t make good cutscenes, and the ones in Just Cause look the same as the ones in Hitman, which I can’t stand. The models in the CGI look like plastic. However, the water looks great. Just Cause managed to capture some of the best water ever to be produced in a game to date. Seriously, the water looks that good.
The gameplay, the major part of any game, is lacking. There are only a few things to do on this huge island. Go on scavenger hunts, liberate settlements, and do story missions. They’re all the same thing though. They involve going to one place, killing this one guy, and then driving all the way back to finish the mission. Nothing interesting at all. There are tons of vehicles to drive, but only a few are actually worth driving. Once you proceed far enough into the story, you can use your PDA (back button), select the agency category, and air drop a vehicle in, which is amazingly handy because without a doubt, this is the biggest map in this genre that has ever been. The most innovative part of the game is the stunts you can perform on any vehicle. With the push of a button, you will jump out of your car, onto the hood, with the ability to jump vehicle to vehicle. Here comes the unrealism. You can stunt from ANYTHING to ANYTHING. Ground to helicopter, car to boat, motorcycle to airplane, and it just gets sickening. It’s already hard to die in this game (if you die in Just Cause, it was probably suicide), and with the ability to jack ANY vehicle from any position, the game is just blah.
Note: There is no Xbox Live or off multiplayer for this game, but it probably would have helped it out. Just Cause would have been a ton of fun with some Co-op going on.
The replay value is low. Low, low, low. Once you, rather, if you can finish this game, you probably won’t want to continue on. If you were to manage to find every unlockable and nab all of the achievements, you would have spent a TON of time. This game is long and will keep you playing if you can overlook the ‘ugh’ of the game.
Final word is no. Don’t buy this. Rent it and see if you can even stand that. I, for one, could not stand it for more than 10 hours and found myself returning it way ahead of the due date. Just Cause has the makings to be an amazing game, Eidos just didn’t execute. Viva la pass this game.
By DemoSquared
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