Games I Want: Just Cause 2
Emergent gameplay is the white whale of open world videogames. Developers have long touted how even they don’t know how a given situation will play out. These claims are usually largely overstated; sure, you’re going to drive around in GTA and blow stuff up but at the end of the day you have to finish the missions.
Red Faction: Guerilla was the first game to truly crack the code. Instead of including the ability to go on a GTA-esque rampage in-between ‘completing’ the game, they made that the whole game. Every mission was ‘here is a rocket launcher and a sledge hammer. Go hog wild.’
Just Cause 2 is Red Faction: Guerilla squared. They have taken that template and mixed in Desert Strike, Far Cry and Michael Bay. Avalanche Studios may have created a game that attains Uncharted 2’s action movie feel without heavy scripting. If you like open world destruction, this game is for you. If you have a zipline fetish, this game is also for you.
Have a blast out there
Just Cause 2 will be the game that Crysis could have been. It’s easy enough to build a tropical island and put some guys on it. Add in some trucks and a helicopter and there you go: the perfect open world game, right? The problem is that even though you can crash a jeep into a school bus full of children, players will quickly become bored without direction.
Tell a player to crash ten jeeps into ten school buses, however, and suddenly everything clicks. They aren’t procrastinating, they’re accomplishing! It sounds so simple, but so do all great inventions after the fact.
GTA set the standard for open world games and everybody followed in lock step with small, targeted missions instead of larger open ended missions. Rewarding you for completing a story segment is far different from making a mission that rewards you for killing 100 civilians, or destroying 20 police cars.
Some would suggest that even directed destruction quickly becomes tiresome. Those people clearly haven’t played Red Faction: Guerilla and experienced first hand how a little hook is all it takes for mindless destruction to be transformed. Red Faction had destroyable buildings. What does Just Cause 2 have?
Did you know one of the vehicles in this game is a jumbo jet? Day 1 purchase
Paratrooper
Just Cause 2 is just like every other shooter you’ve ever played. Except you have a parachute. And a zipline. Also, you can base jump from thousands of feet up and slingshot yourself from one object to another while airborne with your zipline. Also, you can attach people to each other with ropes and create all sorts of comedic physics nightmares. Oh, don’t forget about jumbo jet you can pilot and crash into buildings. Did I mention you can attach tanks to helicopters and swing them around like a giant wrecking ball? Or that you can collapse buildings onto fuel tanks and shoot rockets and jump jeeps off cliffs and … sorry, got carried away there. See what I mean? Just like every other shooter.
The amazing thing about the game is it introduces very few new things to the shooter repertoire: a zipline and a parachute. Introduce too much, and the player is quickly overwhelmed. Half Life 2 was just like every other shooter, except you could manipulate gravity. Small changes from the standard FPS ‘rules’ that everyone is familiar with can create huge variations in gameplay, as illustrated above.
If you’re not convinced that this tiny hook can create gameplay situations that are unique and innovative, check out the following video:
Last action hero
It’s hard to know as a developer when you’ve crossed the line from cinematic to ‘on rails.’ Quick time events and cutscenes create dramatic action sequences that would be impossible to reenact with in-game controls, and as a result cinematic games sometimes feel too restrictive. Even a well executed experience like Uncharted 2 required carefully scripted situations to approach the drama of an action movie.
Is it even possible to create more than just the occasional lucky cinematic event in an open world game? Just Cause 2 is certainly making an attempt, with heroic leaps from jeep to jeep, catapulting from helicopter to helicopter and making last minute escapes from fiery crashes.
It does this without being scripted, of course, by rendering screw ups trivial. Instead of falling under the tires when you miss a jump to another vehicle, you can just pull your parachute, soar into the air and catch up using your zipline. You have to appreciate the little things …
I hope you're insured!
Concerned?
Many games with promise derail somewhere between potential and execution. Just Cause 2 has a couple easy slip-ups it could make: the controls could be fiddly and frustrating (after all it’s tough to aim while you’re rapidly moving before you add the complication of being airborne), the world could be too large and unwieldy and the missions could be dull and repetitive.
Avalanche has implemented an innovative aiming system, however, where the game aids aiming in general but the skilled can still refine the aim towards specific weak points on an enemy, vehicle or building. This streamlines difficulty yet still allows an advantage to skilled players.
The multitude of vehicles and paragliding opportunities will hopefully facilitate swift travel and the missions smartly appear to center around destruction. Everything appears on track but stranger things have happened; every time I start to doubt the potential of Just Cause 2, however, I merely watch this vertical gameplay trailer and am reassured.
There are plenty of ‘just one more’ games, such as just one more would be WoW-killer, just one more action brawler, or just one more open world action game. Most of these I write off as potentially fun distractions, but likely pretenders to the champions of each genre (WoW, God of War and GTA).
Just Cause 2 stands out from the sheer number of ‘holy shit’ moments in the game. It isn’t merely copying open world games that have come before it, but is instead bringing something new to the table. I haven’t been as impressed by gleeful destruction since first stepping into a mechanical walker in Red Faction as I am when watching clips of Just Cause 2. Hopefully this will be a true summer action flick of a game, and not one where all the good scenes were in the trailer.
Finally, take note, Avalanche: mechanical walkers make every game better. There are months of development time remaining. I think you know what to do.
