Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Just Cause for Just Cause 2!

When Just Cause 2 came out, I didn’t give a shit. Amidst the fully destructible environments of Red Faction: Guerilla, the previous game’s meh showing of a bunch of shit I didn’t find too interesting and a marketing campaign that highlighted nothing about what made the game special, there was just too much to play, too little money and not enough time to justify looking into a game that didn’t wow me off the bat and would still run me $50. The DLC pack, which added such incredible items as an armored ice cream truck and a parachute with a skull on it made me feel like I was totally justified in my choice.

Then people ranted about it. And raved. And it dropped down to ten dollars on Steam. So I bought Just Cause 2, basically on a lark.

Holy shit.

Many games want to ease you into their immersive environs. They have tutorials and the like, and they want to be sure you’re safe and secure before they make you take risks. The rarer game is the one that introduces you to what the game should be at the end during the first fifteen minutes. Dragon Age 2, for example, does this. God of War II did the same. Darksiders even did it, to some extent. I love this design choice. It makes me want to play, and it gives me a taste of just how tough my character will eventually become. It establishes a conflict right away where I’m encouraged to grow to this level of prowess. It’s awesome. Just Cause 2 does it better than anyone else.

Just Cause 2 introduces you to the game’s mechanics by putting you into a mission right away, a mission where you’re scooting around doing arbitrary shit while tooltips walk you through it. But the tools available, the gameplay at the heart of Just Cause 2, is the same sort of thing you can expect to see throughout the entire experience. It has a perfect introduction to what has become one of my favorite games. See, I’d originally thought Just Cause 2 was about destruction, chaos and anarchy the way that Red Faction: Guerilla was. That was, in a way, part of how it was marketed. But I was so off.

Just Cause 2 is all about freedom. The game opens with a fairly limited world readily available to you, and you’re encouraged to stick to that area. You likely won’t have learned how to traverse the vast distance of the world of Just Cause 2 yet, after all. But, outside of scripted missions, nothing is ever closed off to you. You can go anywhere, do anything you’d reasonably expect to be able to do in a game and a few things you’d never expect a game to let you do, such as hijacking a jet and riding it into the ocean like a wild bronco. You get points for that shit, too, by the way. It’s not just something you can do, it’s a gameplay mechanic.

It gates this freedom by presenting its various tutorials in missions. You can learn skills accidentally along the way, the way I learned to drag myself along the ground while using the parachute to traverse vast distances with relatively little effort, but odds are that, buried somewhere amidst the various faction missions you have to engage to get anywhere, you’ll find a tutorial training you to do what you keep failing to do. Planes were like that for me. I had no idea what the hell I was doing until the Roaches made me hijack one. After that, I learned everything I needed to know: they were very fast, hard to maneuver and impossible to land. As a side effect of the intended lesson I also learned that planes make an awesome projectile in their own right if you bail out of them at the right moment. Although that can be a little bit pricey, it’s a great way to open up an attack on a military base. Or an oil rig, an object I only learned to attack thanks to the training of one very special mission. I’d seen them for a long time, but I’d never figured out how to take down those monoliths of the ocean until a mission made me do it. Now it’s easily one of my favorite parts of the game: turn the rig into a smouldering heap of scrap and then grab the collectible goodies they’re all loaded with.

This freeform tutorial system, paired with a complete lack of actual game play gating, is really what Just Cause 2 has going on. The destruction system is meh at best, a bunch of scripted items, color coded to boot, that go boom when you shoot them with the right kind of bullets isn’t really anything to write home about. But the freedom surrounding this blasé system of destruction is impressive. There are very few games, even open world games, that are willing to let you literally climb mountains. And the island setting, much as it did in Morrowwind, makes for an ideal means of establishing boundaries for play. I’m not sure how far you can wander from the island, much as I was never entirely sure in Morrowwind, because I really don’t care when there’s so much cool shit to do on the island itself. The developers of Just Cause 2 have done a commendable job not just in building a playground filled with interesting things to do which, I must begrudgingly admit, they’ve done commendably. They’ve also given you unprecedented access to this playground.

This is something open world games need to take notes on. Games such as GTA IV and Red Faction: Guerilla, for all the good ideas they have, gate their world off like nobody’s business. They limit the parts of the world you can explore and the manner in which you can explore them with some pretty draconian specifications. Rockstar’s games always feel particularly bad about this to me, with their ostensibly open worlds always on prominent display during advertising for their games it seems that much more offensive when they place artificial barrier after artificial barrier between you and the big bad world that they promised you would never be withheld from you.

It could be that this stems from some sort of fear of what total freedom would bring, and perhaps that’s justified. Just Cause 2 has held my attention for far less time than either of the aforementioned games, perhaps because I feel no need to invest myself in everything available to me or risk losing the game I paid for. I’ve spent around 20 hours in it so far, and I seem to be close to the end already. I might come back to play it again some time, but I can’t see myself investing the ninety or so hours I dropped in GTA IV into Just Cause 2 despite the latter being a far superior game. And some of this might come from the fact that the game doesn’t gate any of its content and, as a result, there’s no incentive for me to slog through shit I don’t normally like. Why bother with silly little racing games when I’ve got the whole world to play around with? If I win one of those racing games will a helicopter with an amazing new gun and incredible speed become available to me? If not, why should I give a shit?

So in a way Just Cause II has spoiled me. With its sickeningly abundant freedom, I no longer feel inclined to toil through environs I find unpleasant. Whenever I return to Kane and Lynch I find myself wondering, even more so than previously, why I’m playing this game with its painfully scripted fights and gated bits of gameplay. Even Dragon Age II feels kind of meh, with all its walking through city dungeons and dungeon dungeons, most of which re-use the same basic tilesets.

In fact, the most exciting game I’ve played since starting Just Cause 2 has been the indie darling VVVVVVVVVVVVV (add additional Vs to taste), a game that’s all about tossing you into the mix without any training or knowledge and letting you sort it out as you go along. It brings open world ideals to 8-bit play, and it does some wonderful things with it. So maybe what I’m really saying here, aside from the fact that Just Cause 2 is an excellent investment for your time and money, is that the open world revolution has started, and that no one has noticed yet. Since I’m sure it’ll take over soon and we’ll all be crushed beneath its fashionable jackboot ere long I’ll be the first one to just say it. Long live the open world. Goodnight.