Just Cause

THE BAD:
- *...meaning you'll get lost or spend lots of time walking rather slowly.
- Graphically not so strong on textures or detail, but distance shots are nice enough, I suppose.
- Dull central character.
- Terrible and limited music, and the sound effects could do with a decent overhaul.
- Repetative side missions.

SUMMARY:
Taking a glance at the Bad column above, you might wonder why I've still given JUST CAUSE on PlayStation2 such a high score.

The answer is simple: while the game doesn't look like Miss Hawai'ian Tropics and it sounds like all the sound has been developed inside a rusty can of baked beans, it's so much fun. Just as GOLDENEYE 007 and the original SONIC THE HEDGEHOG games have been superceeded by better-looking titles yet still retain their playability, JUST CAUSE will keep drawing you back for the sheer fun factor alone. This is thanks to several key gameplay features that place the adventures of CIA Agent Rico Rodriguez above other free-roaming games such as GRAND THEFT AUTO.

The plot is simple enough. An entire tropical island, the fictional San Esperito, is under the control of a corrupt military dictatorship, and is funding the United States with cheap, low-grade cocaine. The CIA obviously can't have this, so change a few details of the old plan to assassinate Fidel Castro and send in Rico (a lifeless gunman, with as much personality as a Ritz cracker). Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to start a revolution and place the island back in the relatively safe hands of gangs and drug dealers you and Uncle Sam can fund and trust.

San Esperito is made to scale, and roughly in the real world would span 1,025km squared. That's a lot of ground to cover. Mostly, it's hills and jungle, with a few mountains, but there are also massive cities, large airports, government safehouses, drug lord mansions, prison islands and a palace dotted around the vast map. Getting around is either ridiculously slow if you walk, drive or fly, or brilliantly fast if you've unlocked enough safehouses to call in an extraction and be airlifted to wherever you want to go. Early on you'll be annoyed: with few safehouses, there's a limit to where you can be airlifted to and getting to that objective miles from any safehouse takes forever.

The graphics range from "Oh, that's nice..." to "Are you sure I'm not playing a MegaDrive here?" Trees are the worst culprits for graphical ineptitude, but road surfaces are also just smudges of grey. The main airport, Mendoza International, is distressing to walk around due to the fact Rico appears to be floating over a surface that was filled in with Microsoft Paint. But everything is recognisable at least: cars are cars, with four wheels and a roof as standard, and jets are jets, with two wings, etc. etc. You get my point. They do the job, but then so did Donald Rumsfeld, and you wouldn't have a picture of him on your wall.

JUST CAUSE is so worth buying and playing, however, despite this. Because when your feet leave the badly-drawn ground, this game becomes excellent. Firstly, a grappling-hook gun can fire and reel you in to hijack any vehicle: not just cars, but boats and aeroplanes, too. Leaping from plane to plane in mid-air is ridiculously fun, especially if one of those planes is the ultra-nippy jet fighter available at the end of the main story. The stunts are just plain insane, and won't be found anywhere else.

Even better is skydiving. If you fly a helicopter up to the highest point in the map and leap out, it takes almost four minutes to reach the ground. Pulling the re-usable parachute chord at the last second is a wonderful rush. This parachute comes in handy at all times: don't worry about the total lack of realism as you drive off a cliff, leap out your door and sail to safety as your car explodes on the rocks below. Oh, and if you ever find yourself in the middle of nowhere without a vehicle and miles from the nearest road, call in a Heavy Drop. Select either a dirtbike, an armoured Jeep, a nippy gyrocopter or a stealth boat and you've got the best of the excellent vehicles at your fingertips.

In fact, the only thing that might spoil your enjoyment of JUST CAUSE is the sound. It's awful, from tinny pop-guns to whining engines and plain boring helicopter blades, all accompanied by five bad tracks of repetative music. The solution? Mute the television and put on a James Bond film soundtrack. It's what I do, and I've never had more fun on a game without actually completing a mission objective: the temptation for just messing around in the biggest playground on PlayStation2 is just too strong.

Mentioning James Bond, JUST CAUSE becomes perfectly clear. It's a gigantic constant stream of ridiculous stunts and big explosions, featuring top-of-the-range vehicles and plenty of guns. In fact, the only difference between this and a Bond feature are the production values, but this hardly matters. Did you hear me when I mentioned the re-usable parachute?

Go and play now. JUST CAUSE is a classic.