Gaming Trend

Gaming Trend Review

Just Cause

1. Official Site
2. Platform: Xbox
3. Publisher: Eidos Interactive
4. Developer: Avalanche Studios
5. Release Date: 09/27/06
6. Genre: Action/Adventure

by Mitch Youngblood

It’s a tribute to the absolute insane fun possible with Just Cause that despite all the weird graphical glitches and easy-to-reproduce bugs and console lock-ups that I’m not only still playing but still having fun. The goal of developer Avalanche must have been to create as large a gameworld as possible and not have any in-game load times outside of between missions. It’s to their credit that they succeeded wildly, but both they and publisher Eidos deserve to be taken out and flogged for such shoddy quality control. The following is an example of the completely unhinged sort of free-form mayhem possible in Just Cause, and just how easily enjoyment can swing into frustration courtesy of bugs.

I’m several hours into the game and have liberated roughly half of the banana republic from El Presidente. The guerrillas and I are simpatico, the CIA loves me for delivering results while they work on their suntans, and the enemy drug cartel is running scared. Then I receive a call from the scorching hot wife of the Rioja drug cartel, an ally in my war of terror. She and her husband have located the cocoa fields of the rival drug cartel and she wants my character to destroy them muy pronto. No further instructions are given so it sounds like a quick get in-blow stuff up-get out sort of mission.

The mission is assigned on a hill overlooking the near-by valley where the cocoa fields are. If you, Constant Reader, have ever been to an island then you’re already aware of how the roads follow the terrain regardless of how daffy that may seem. Just Cause is designed with that in mind, for better or worse, and a road leading east or west will wind and zig and zag long before it curves towards your ultimate destination. Fortunately for the mission I just started, I’d flown to the meeting in an attack helicopter and parked at the heliport. So I hopped in, lifted off, and headed towards the cocoa fields with an evil glint in my eye.

Once at the location I send forth many rockets, and the damage they performed was good. Cocoa fields were aflame, gun toting minions of the drug cartel were systematically wiped out, and an enemy helicopter fell to my guns during battle. Scorching Hot Wife radios in to say that my mission was a success and to return to the drop point. I beat a hasty retreat back to where we met, only to find her long gone and her husband knocking back Cervesas at the bar. We drink to “our” success, and then the screen fades to black.

When it fades back in I stand before a government-held city on the verge of revolution. I save my game, then activate the guerrilla standing in two feet away thus beginning another liberation. Immediately, I realize the stakes are far, far greater this time. The government, knowing my penchant for blasting everything in sight, has prepared their fortifications well. Many small tanks stream forth blasting the rebels at the city’s entrance. Enemy attack helicopters roar over the cityscape launching missiles at our position. My compatriots and I make it about halfway through the city before enough ammunition lands on our position to end our game. I reload to repeat the assault and again it ends in bloody failure. Again I try, yet the result is the same. I grow weary of dying ignominiously in the same third-world back alleys while advancing the cause of nation build..., er... democracy, but I decide to soldier forth and try once more.

This time, however, things are different when I reload. The guerrilla who starts the mission has vanished. The marker showing where he should be still shines through on the map, but he has vanished into the night. Doubly ironic considering he must be there due to programming, and also because it’s the middle of the afternoon. Considering this a glitch, I reload my game only to find him still not there. I try this three times and again he remains not there. It’s not like he’s wearing an invisibility cloak and I can just activate his position to start the mission, he is physically gone. So I jack a nearby car to drive off when suddenly he appears. I start the mission again and this final time I am victorious.

Visually, Just Cause looks like it was made last year. For comparison’s sake, I threw GTA: Vice City into my PS2 and compared it to Just Cause on my Xbox and while Just Cause was the winner it wasn’t as much of a blow-out as one might think. While the game world is very pretty from high up in the clouds, there were more than a few problems with it once Rico hits the ground.

For example, whenever Rico takes over a settlement or Montano stronghold he charges in while other guerrillas or Rioja members literally appear out of thin air to join in the assault. While I can appreciate the need for spawn points in a game of this size I consider it bad form to have both friends and enemies literally appearing out of the ether. What makes things worse is how the game throws wave after wave after wave of these enemies at you and they never appear to come from anywhere. That being said there are side missions like this where a bonus is destroying the local police stations and ammunition dumps. It would be nice if blowing these up had much of an effect other than showing off some pretty fire, but doing this never stems the tide of enemies.

Character models aren’t anything fancy but they get the job done. The scale of the game was clearly in the landscape because the closer in your eye looks the rougher the details appear. Cars, trucks, guns, and people all look above average but there is never a moment in Just Cause where the game just looks dazzling. While that may not be the case on the 360 version, the regular Xbox version looks okay at best. There are plenty of times when you may be in the sky and catch some lens flare off a sunrise, but when Rico is on the ground in the thick of things the game goes from pretty to pretty average in the blink of an eye.

I have to give Avalanche credit for their voice casting. The guy who performs for Rico’s American contact sounds exactly like Joe Don Baker which fills me with glee. Every time he filled Rico in on an assignment I could here him taunting James Bond in Goldeneye and perps in the original 1973 Walking Tall. Yes, I’m a strange one. But if you imagine he has a 2 X 4 stashed under his desk, it makes his mission briefings uniquely funny. His female counterpart brings a healthy amount of sass and attitude to her role, but neither overwhelms her performance. Her character fails to leave much of an impression other than being nicely rendered in a bikini. As for Rico himself, it sounds like the actor aimed for Antonio Banderas in Desperado but actually hit Antonio Banderas in those nasal spray ads where he voices the bee in love with a flower.

No, I don’t understand how my brain makes these leaps either but after 29 years of dealing with it you learn to cope.

As for the sound effects themselves, they resemble the graphics in the sense that while they get the job done they are fairly removed from top-notch work. Any one that plays the game for longer than a few minutes will head to the menu and drop the volume on the music because even when it’s not at the maximum level it manages to overwhelm situations. There are also several audio glitches in Just Cause most notably how sometimes players will start a mission but the voice queues don’t start on account of the music playing instead. I went through an entire mission once having to guess what I was supposed to do because the audio briefing never started. Yet the band kept wailing on the soundtrack so one can imagine the coding looks something like the following:

If Mariachi Band = Jamming
then
Briefing Dialogue = False

Is this frustrating at times? Absolutely. But since the majority of missions have targets that appear on the easy-to-read mini-map, then figuring out what you need to do at any given moment is seldom an issue. Add to that a good mission description that’s available in your PDA and Rico is good to go. But hearing it instead of seeing it would help too, Avalanche.

The controls for Just Cause are pretty simple to pick up. It’s a shame then that the vehicles are more of a pain to control than it’s worth. When Rico is on foot, the thumbsticks handle their respective moves (right controls movement while left controls the camera) and the right trigger fires hand-held weapons while the left trigger throws grenades. The directional pad cycles between all of your available weaponry. Hitting the white button repeatedly cycles through all available targets and the black button reloads. The B button is for jumping, the A button is for activating things, the Y button cancels out of the menu, and the select button activates your PDA.

Once you get into a vehicle things become far more interesting.

First of all you have to control the vehicle. Depending on what Rico is driving or flying, this is a challenge all by itself. Since there are several types of vehicles in Just Cause Rico (and by "Rico" I mean "You") needs to keep his wits about him based on what he decided to highjack. For example, there are a variety of planes scattered around the island. The fighter jet handles decidedly different than the passenger plane, and both have their own unique runways to contend with as well. Different motorcycles also handle differently not only on the paved streets but also on the dirt roads. The same goes for anything else with wheels or treads be it a taxi or a tank.

While it may sound like Avalanche balanced out every vehicle in the game such is not the case. Each and every vehicle could at any moment fly out of control especially those on the ground. One minute you’re driving along and then you make a hair correction on the road and BAM! You go into a power slide with no warning.

Should Rico so desire to leap to another car or plane then hitting the A button gets him onto either the hood or wing, vehicle depending, which is called the "stunt position." From there he can hit A again to activate his parachute and sail off into the sky, or hit B to jump to another vehicle if he’s close enough, or hit Y to re-enter his vehicle or take over a new one. Should Rico drive said vehicle off a near-by cliff, then simply hitting A then A again will have him out of the car and gleefully floating through the skies in the blink of an eye.

The story at the beginning of the review is indicative of Just Cause start to finish. Tremendous fun marred by tremendous bugs and absolutely no warning whatsoever when the difficulty curve shoots through the roof. It goes from "relatively easy" to "TANKS!" in the blink of an eye with no middle ground. It has so many graphical oddities and audio glitches you feel at times like you’re playing a beta. Yet for its many, many, problems Just Cause remains a heck of a lot of fun to play. It misses the mark completely for being a good game courtesy of far too many idiotic (and easily catchable) problems. But the core gameplay is so addictive and fun that you find yourself forgiving the problems despite knowing you shouldn’t. Things do get repetitive towards the end, especially if you do literally everything in the game, but for the most part there remains plenty of fun for all.

Players take on the roll of gun-for-hire Rico, a CIA "specialist" who seems to specialize in regime change south of the border. Once inserted onto the island, Rico has the chance to hook up with various power factions who offer him all manner of jobs designed to make El Presidente’s life hell. In between the story and side missions, Rico can cause all manner of havoc by jacking every sort of vehicle available, then driving it off a cliff and parachuting away to safety.

Once players get Rico ingrained in the world of guerrillas and rival drug lords then they’ll get a taste of the side missions. The game boasts that it has hundreds of side missions to choose from, and while the numbers back this claim up, the variety does not. Side missions usually fall into the Fed Ex category of take package X to person Y then return to the guy who gave you the mission. Sometimes Rico gets to blow something up then run for it, or capture a vehicle and return it to a specific base. The Rioja drug cartel side missions tend to be more fun than the guerrilla missions if only because their nature is more violent. Successfully completing side missions net players respect points for a given side, and if you earn enough respect then you are awarded a new title, additional firepower and vehicles at your safehouses. Each safe house comes with a specific vehicle assigned to it so while one safehouse may have a motor cycle another will have an attack helicopter.

The first thing players will notice when they delve into Just Cause is the map. Accessing Rico’s PDA map shows the entirety of the island, and zooming out all the way will indicate as to just how friggin’ huge the map is. The best part is you can cross the map end to end without ever encountering a load screen, but the down side is that it will take a long, long time to do so in a car. Taking the skies speeds things up considerably, but one of the coolest parts of the PDA is the "Extraction" option. Using this picks Rico up from wherever he’s at and drops him off at either his next primary mission briefing or at the safe house of his choice. By "dropping him off" I mean "kicking him out of the back of a helicopter and letting him freefall to it."

Easily the coolest part of Just Cause is the parachute and the endless variety of stunts Rico can perform. Hitting the A button while riding a motorcycle will throw open the parachute and yank Rico high up into the air. From there, he can use his grappling hook to latch onto another vehicle, reel himself in, then leap onto the top of the car and kick out the driver to assume control and drive off. It’s nine kinds of awesome when you pull this off the first time. If Rico is chased by the cops then he can always drive straight off a cliff, leap onto the top of the truck as it plummets towards the ravine below, pull out his parachute and sail off into the sky as the pursuing cops fall to their doom.

In addition to the mayhem Rico causes during and between missions there remain a few things to see and do on the island. Scattered around the island are several "collection" items that Rico can pick up for additional respect or item bonuses. All of their locations are shown on the map, but actually finding them can sometimes be extremely tough. I’m thinking of the "super weapon" ones in particular. But if you want to see just how good your skills are behind the wheel then Just Cause also has several races scattered about. Much like the game as a whole, some of the races are easy, some are insane, and maybe one is right in between.

The utter lack of balance wouldn’t be so much of an issue if it wasn’t so blatantly obvious. The enemy AI, and the partner AI for that matter, spawn constantly when you attack their bases and seem to have two settings only. They either charge all out or run away. This goes the same for the enemy vehicles which frequently target just you instead of you and everyone around you. Hey Avalanche, that’s not called challenging that’s called lazy programming. What’s more is there doesn’t seem to be an adverse affect to leaving regions de-stabilized and moving on.

To clarify, once Rico finishes his primary mission in a region then that area changes from blue to red on the Political Map in his PDA. The Political Map shows which regions are controlled by the government (blue), which ones are politically de-stabilized (red), and which ones are held by the guerrillas (green). Some missions from the mid-point on de-stabilize multiple regions at once, and Rico has the choice of pressing on with his primary missions or helping the guerrillas take back the island one province at a time. Helping the guerrillas out is way cool, but there seems to be no adverse affect to leaving the de-stabilized territories alone. At least not that I could tell.

On the plus side, players can always finish off the side missions, races, and collections et al once the primary campaign is finished and El Presidente has been removed from office. Completionists like Yours Truly love this option in games so bravo to Avalanche. They do a great number of things right in Just Cause but the game was simply rushed out the door. If anyone says it was in development for north of three years then obviously that wasn’t long enough. There is a lot of fun here but make sure you have a bottle of Advil handy.

This reviewer remained puzzled by certain aspects of the game until I realized the focus must have been on the 360 achievements. When you attack an enemy cartel location you’ll notice several black dots appear on the mini-map. These are usually ammo dumps or boxes of cocoa that can be destroyed for "bonuses." I’ve seized most of these locations in the game and I’m still waiting to see what the bonus is. If it’s the amount of respect earned by taking the location then I’ve found no indication of that anywhere. If hitting all of these add up to certain 360 achievements, well then someone forgot to take out the line of text in the regular Xbox version.

So why is this paragraph in the Value section?

Because you will see it time and again as you play Just Cause for hours on end. It’s a seriously addictive title that, despite its numerous quirks, is a lot of fun to play. There are weeks worth of content in this game and at least the majority of it is worth playing. Sure things like sieges and side missions grow stale, but the fun comes from mixing things up. If you’re tired of charging into a small village and taking out drug lords, then go steal a tank or a helicopter then launch the attack. Avalanche managed to get the free-form nature of the massive game world exactly right, and it is to their credit that the game remains fun in spite of the problems. With so many things to do, places to go, and people/objects to blow up gamers will find many moons worth of entertainment in Just Cause.

I also knocked 10 points off the original value score on account of the bugs and various glitches. No game in this day and age should hard lock a console and I feel that we as gamers have become complacent in accepting this. We’re so used to Windows blue screening or games crashing to the desktop that we figured that day would come to our beloved consoles soon enough. Unfortunately, that time is now and Just Cause lost me more than a few hours worth of progress during my play through. Sometimes the game would even lock going through the PDA menus which is, you know, where 95 percent of your information comes from. As fun as the game is, this just aggravates the holy fire out of me and you, Constant Reader, should be aware of it going in.

Just Cause is a fun, albeit highly frustrating, experience. For starters, the bugs and glitches are across-the-board aggravating and Avalanche, Eidos and Microsoft all should have kept this title in development for at least another month. It’s not like the game was going out "into the wild." This particular version was going on exactly one hardware platform so these sorts of problems are inexcusable. But it’s to Avalanche’s credit as to how much fun the game is that while I may complain about the glitches, I still played through Just Cause in its entirety and enjoyed the heck out of it. From collecting items, to driving cars off mountain tops, to dogfighting in attack helicopters, to leading the revolution Just Cause is a bounty of fun.

If the entire Just Cause experience was boiled down to one phrase it would be this: Frustrating, but fun. Take that for what you will.

Gaming Trend Score

78

1. Graphics: 80
2. Audio: 78
3. Controls: 70
4. Gameplay: 84
5. Value/Replay: 70
6. OVERALL:78