Tales of Interest: Just Cause 2 – Chapter One

Posted 04/05/2010 at 9:47pm | by Nathan Grayson

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Game diaries are great and all, but let’s face it: they can be kind of boring. “And then I shot this guy, and then I delivered a George Foreman grill to this other guy.” Etc. This led me to realize something that, I’m pretty sure, no other author in the history of writing has ever figured out: People like reading interesting things. With that in mind, I’ve decided to only spin yarns about my virtual exploits when I think you’ll derive some form of entertainment from them. So, with that said, I’m now interrupting my regularly scheduled High-Minded Industry Critiques to bring you… Tales of Interest.

Just Cause 2 is about warring factions, revolution, and the wealth of complex politics surrounding such achingly relevant issues.

No it’s not. Not at all. Just Cause 2 is a game about a grappling hook. This is that grappling hook’s story.

Fittingly enough, Just Cause 2 begins with you thrown out into the cold with nothing but a grappling hook and the clothes on your back. Oh, and the other thing on your back: a parachute. Well, actually, it’s more like a magical compartment that houses a tiny sweat shop that’s forced to work ‘round the clock sewing an infinite supply of parachutes for your ridiculous antics. Point is, I started with a mere two items, but the possibilities were already infinite.

In fact, if there’s a central moral to Just Cause 2, it’s thus: grappling hooks and parachutes can solve all of life’s problems. And so it was when the game tasked me with infiltrating my first military base. A single guard stood perched on a ledge outside the base, surveying the area for would-be intruders. He was not, however, keeping an especially focused eye out for grappling hooks, so I – standing about 50 feet away – stuck him in the stomach and gave my line a tug. Gravity did the rest.

But oh no! He came down from the impregnable wall, but how ever would I go up? Now here’s the part where I turn things over to you, dear reader. Do you think I a) constructed an elaborate wooden horse and presented it to the base as a “gift,” only to spring forth from the wooden steed guns-a-blazing as soon as I was inside, b) spent 40 real-time hours tunneling under the wall with my bare hands, or c) used my grappling hook?

If you chose C, congratulations! You’re right. If you chose anything other than C, you probably failed the reading comprehension portion of the SAT.

So I rocketed up the wall and deployed my parachute, which carried me right into the line of sight of more mean men. As bad guys are wont to do, they opened fire, and since I’d yet to acquire a gun, I was helpless. Well, except for one thing. You see, like any good evil military organization, this one had a surplus of exploding barrels. And at that moment, their problem was my solution, since they’d stacked their cylindrical combustibles on a ledge above my gun-toting nemeses. One tug of my grappling hook later, and the baddies were toast.

But that’s just Grappling Hook Usage 101. So let’s fast-forward a bit. I was tasked with rescuing a potential ally located at the top of a skyscraper, though really, the colossal triumph of human ingenuity was more of a spacescraper if you ask me. Luck for me, a more apt title for Just Cause 2 might be “Spider-Man liberates an island nation by climbing and blowing shit up.” So I scaled the building in seconds. Two guards were waiting for me near the top. After shooting one of them, I stuck the other with my grappling hook, and then attached the other end of the rope to the side of the building. It was then that I began to feel truly sorry for this poor guard. Whether he was deathly afraid of heights or deathly afraid of his imminent death I’ll never know, but he screamed his lungs out while he dangled from the roof by a single, quickly deteriorating strand. So then I cut the rope, watched him fall for 20 seconds or so, and had a good laugh about it.

Videogames? Wrecking society? Who said that? Man, you just give me a name and I’ll dangle those bastards from a building and watch them fall so fast. You don’t even know.

But I digress. Apparently, my little show convinced the other guards that I was something of a threat, so they sent a helicopter after me. Big mistake. As soon as the helicopter was within range, I grappled onto its underside, swung onto its front window, and dispatched its pilot. Looks like the minigun-equipped war ‘copter’s on the other foot now, doesn’t it? One incredibly one-sided battle later, my mission was complete.

But that’s only the tip of the iceberg. Just Cause 2 is almost overwhelmingly enormous, and presents what I’d dare to call the first truly open world in a videogame. You can go anywhere anytime, provided you’re creative enough to procure the needed tools to get there. As such, I’ll be sharing a few of my more unique in-game experiences with you over the next few days, in lieu of a traditional review.

If you’d like one of those, though, here it is: buy this game. You won’t be sorry.