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Just ‘cuz. Just. ‘Cuz. If you’re saying “Just Cause,” you’re saying it wrong. Also the title card for this game is crappy, so here’s a guy jumping out of a plane.
Now this is my kind of GTA. Whereas GTA tries to take itself so darn seriously, games like Just Cause (and Saint’s Row I’m told) are just all about having fun. Why? Just cuz, that’s why. Suddenly it’s easy to not only believe but be perfectly okay with accepting the fact that my character is more lead than flesh by the time I’m done with a mission. I don’t care that can jump out of a moving vehicle at nearly any speed and be fine. I don’t care that my special power is summoning a parachute out of nowhere at any given time because I feel like it. It all happens just ‘cuz.
I’m a bit spoiled though, as I started off playing Just Cause 2 years ago. For those of you who don’t know, in Just Cause you play as “Scorpion,” a gruff agent whose specialty is air-dropping onto islands and ridding them of their corrupt governments. How does he do this? Shooting, gunning, Hollywood-explosioning, car-chasing, shooting some more and generally causing as much havoc as possible to those who get in his way.
Just Cause 2 is all of this… only better, faster and with more ways to do it. JC is basically the larva form of JC2–it’s not a bad game, it just lacks so much of what made JC2 a blast and when I say “so much” I almost exclusively mean the grappling hook. Almost 70% of the stupid-fun stuff you did in JC2 was b/c of that one simple thing. Without it, JC is fun but… it’s just not the same.
You also don’t/can’t blow buildings up and you aren’t graded on “chaos caused.” You also (as far as I can tell) can’t ask Sheldon for air drops (unless you unlock it later). I mean, basically, Just Cause 2 is one of those rare cases where the sequel is actually better in nearly every way. It’s not that JC is bad, nor do I blame it for not having the ridiculous amount of content that Enix put into its sequel, but it’s just that I feel like I’ve done all of this before only in a much more expanded way, having me award this at Tier 2. Still fun, but if I want to get my chaos fix, I’ll just stick to its older brother.
