[MINI REVIEW] [PS3] Just Cause 2

Having being an owner of this title's predecessor on the PS2, I was certainly drawn towards giving this one a go. Where the previous title failed, this explosive belter of a game improved.

The missions are a non-stop ride jam-packed with explosions, vehicle interaction and some physics manipulation, aided by the main character's grappling hook wristband. At several points in the game, I did wonder whether the free gameplay sequences were quite good enough to merit the appalling blandness of most of the mission-instruction videos: each of the three faction's leaders arrive, leave and act in the same fashion and tell you a person/place/vehicle to kidnap/ hijack / blow-to-pieces and throw you a crate. Every time. But then I blew up a ballistic missile mid-launch using a helicopter's rockets after hijacking said helicopter using the grapple gun after jumping off the said missile's launch tower. Oh hell yes!

The free exploration available is very, very impressive as well. Although the towns/villages/military bases you come across are on the whole very similar (a clear copy-and-paste job for many) there are hundreds of settlements to discover across a 400 square mile environment which includes mountains, harbours, airports, satellite facilities and power stations to explore and destroy to your heart's content. Imagine looking ten miles North, South, East and West from your home town and getting in a jet and soaring across it in around 4 minutes; it's a stunning experience, I can tell you!
Getting around has been accounted for and you are able to quick travel to any previously discovered location after a small video clip (which does get annoying eventually) but this still means many hours of getting first time to the extremely scattered locations around the enormous map on offer. This is actually quite an enjoyable trek in spite of how daunting it is!

Overall, the scale and scope of this game really feels high definition and has given me about 40 hours of engaging gameplay, so long as you like blowing things up. Now out second hand for £10 to £15, it would truly be money well-spent.

Total: 87%