Just Cause
Avalanche's GTA-in-the-jungle attempt is solid, just not on the PS2.
Published: October 9, 2006
Unfortunately, the as the rush of pulling off a Hollywood blockbuster-level series of stunts wears thin, the actual amount of stuff to do on the island is made a little more clear. Those 250,000 acres increasingly start to feel cut and pasted, with a smattering of trees across the undulating terrain and any number of mix-and-match guerilla villages to free, military bases to storm, towns to cruise around all dotting the landscape in startlingly frequent combinations. Once you've blown up your umpteenth government blockade, it all starts to feel a little too recycled.
All this is long after you've actually tired of the game's painfully simple firing system where you just sort of sweep the target over the general direction of an enemy and hammer on the fire button until everyone stops in place and then does a little bunny hop before dying. In fact, the visuals as a whole are absolutely horrid for the most part; the framerate ranges from spotty to downright horrid, the texture work makes it look like a single texture was used for the entire island while fugly little trees dot the landscape. Rico's animations are stiff, and the pre-rendered video bits amazingly heavily dithered and compressed, but the vehicles in the game are at least nicely detailed, which is a plus given how often you'll see them.
The audio is just as lopsided; the music in the game is easily the most uniformly impressive part of it, but the voice acting and the sound effects fall flat. It's weird to have a little pop gun-sounding series of weapons meekly sneeze out shots while a fantastically executed series of Spanish guitar licks and driving 4/4 rhythms punctuate the action. Appearances from surf rock-inspired warbling guitars and any number of little percussive notes spicing things up just help build the aural backdrop... so that the wimpy rest of the effects can chip away at it.
Though San Esperito offers enough minor distractions for a while -- things like races and fetching packages while killing a random, supposedly special target at least support the illusion that there's a whole island worth of stuff to explore -- the realization that this world isn't nearly as dense nor lovingly created with the same kind of attention to detail and nuance that more urban sandbox games slowly helps strip away most of the lasting fun.
Just Cause on any other platform is a perfect rental; just long enough that you'll have beaten it and explored some of the island's side missions, but you won't feel stiffed when you realize that there really isn't a ton of stuff to do here. However, there's the distinct feeling that the game was pushed onto the PS2 because of the system's install base. It's clearly not a game meant for the comparatively ancient hardware of Sony's six year old machine, and everything about the game just screams cash-in. If you must play the game, do it on another system.
