Just Cause Hands-on

Aug 22, 2006

Taking cues from a smattering of well-liked current-gen titles, newly formed developer Avalanche is now putting on the final touches to Just Cause, a wild, open-world game that's original and kooky enough to warrant a serious look from hardcore and casual gamers alike. Shown at this year's Electronic Entertainment Exposition 2006 and covered thoroughly by Websites and magazines across the world, Just Cause is the brainchild of Avalanche Studios, a new Swedish studio comprised of several veteran developers who have conjured up a funny, colorful, and engaging action game.

Although I dislike explaining that a game is like "example A crossed with example B," like so many folks do in the movie industry, a very good way to describe Eidos' new game is to refer to a few games you know extremely well. So I must sin a little in that direction. Just Cause is an open world game like Grand Theft Auto. The landscape is massive, totaling up 250,000 acres (390.625 miles), making it one of the biggest recent videogames on the planet. The third-person perspective game (which also offers a first-person view) places you in the boots of Rico Rodriguez, a highly skilled mercenary hired by a top secret organization to prevent an evil foreign government from stockpiling weapons and resources that can create nuclear weapons. In other words, it's a typical story of good versus evil and you're the Spanish speaking bad-ass who is going to smoke the bad guys single-handedly. The game takes place in the fictitious San Esperito, a South American city, which can be viewed by a menu map peppered with mission spots and places of interest.

Like GTA, the world is humongous, and it's open. AI cars drive through cities on their own, shootable birds fly in flocks across the sky, flyable helicopters and airplanes are there for the jacking, and missions outside of the main story-driven ones, are available at any time. It's also got a sense of humor, one that reminds me of Eidos' Total Overdose and its crazy, cartoonish ways.

Being like Rockstar's game, it's also quite like Mercenaries, a game that's kind of like the military-heavy spiritual cousin of GTA. Avalanche's title enables you to drive any kind of vehicle including boats, cars, helicopters, and airplanes, and many military versions of these vehicles. Aside from the ugly sedans, pick-ups, and station wagons you can regularly jack, players can steal mopeds, motorcycles, and monster trucks, too. The military vehicles are more…radical. You've got the McKenzie-Fergusson F2 Victor airplane, a commercial Boeing 747, and C-130, a cargo plane, which just happens to carry tanks. Lastly, you've got that familiar red flare that signals in allied airplanes which pick you up and bring you to new mission locations.

There is one final comparison: For you Nintendo fans, of which I am one, the game brings the joys of flying and parachuting like the classic Super NES game, PilotWings. You can drop from airplanes, helicopters or any other air-based vehicle at any time, pull your parachute, and glide through the massive airscape. The views are impressive. You have a clear and detailed perspective of the massive environment below, and if you're skilled enough to glide yourself there, it's yours for the taking. The physical sense of flying is superbly delivered. Once having jumped from a plane, you can pull your parachute at any time, or not… Hurling through the air with military fatigues flapping in the wind, hair flowing back behind your head, arms and legs spread, you can just drop through the air and take it all in.

What enhances this sensation is the height from which you're able to fly. Avalanche's engine is robust and takes advantage of the next generation's (or high-end PC's) RAM and processing power. The first thing I did was jump in a helicopter and fly as high as possible. No, you can't leave the atmosphere, though I tried, but you can fly higher than in any game I can remember in the recent past. The great heights reminded me of the first time in Spider-Man 2 when I slung myself up to the top of a New York skyscraper and looked over the city in awe. No offense to Activision's game (which I loved), but in Just Cause, Spider-Man 2's vertical airspace is weak-sauce in comparison. Plus, you can pull out the parachute, instantly hone it back in, and then ripcord it out again. So unrealistic, yet so fun.

From there, Avalanche Studios forges some interesting ideas into the mix, customizing its game into some relatively new. After 2.5 years in development, the Swedish team's single-player action game enables players to engage in dozens of shooting missions, perform stunt-jumps, and use a grappling hook with a remarkably funky result. The grappling hook, which issues this sweet air-pressure sound of sleek gadgetry accompanied by a swirling wire that corkscrews through the air, is not realistic by any means. It's just damn cool! Using a scrolling tool (D-pad on consoles) to flip through weapons, players can select this hook to take advantage of the game's other best qualities, paragliding. You ever see those vacationing dudes strapped to a parachute and pulled by a boat across the water? Looks pretty fun, right? Same action here. Except this grappling hook attaches to any moving vehicle within a 30- 40 foot radius -- cars, planes, boats, copters, motorcycles, etc.

The mechanic is a simple act of genius, really. The hook always instantly detaches and reattaches as long as a vehicle is targeted. Just jump, shoot the grapple hook and once a speeding vehicle is targeted, press parachute, and bla-blam! The speeding vehicle pulls you into the air like a kite on a windy day. By handling the direction of your chute, you can stay in the air, slowly glide to earth, or reel yourself in to the car. Again, this works on any vehicle. Once you get the hang of it, Just Cause reveals itself as a kind of vehicle-hopping combo-game, sort of like a fighting game's air-juggling system. You start figuring out ways to combo off vehicles and the fun is no longer just in completing missions. It's all about trying the most radical jumps and stunts and comboing them together. This mechanic in itself is addictive, original, and tremendous fun.

Combine that with the ability to perform stunt moves, and you quickly realize the scope of actions possible. The stuns moves, if you haven't already read about them, are one-button moves that place you in a ready position on any vehicle. After having booted the driver from a car (which shows a hilarious animation of the innocent driver being kicked far and wide from the passenger door), you press a button and jump onto its roof. In a plane, you jump out, in mid-air mind you, and hold onto the wing. If you're on the helicopter, you hang into the tail, and so on. The beauty of the stunt move is its simplicity, but also its open-endedness. By timing your moves precisely, you can stunt jump from one car to another car, a motorcycle to a car, or a car to a boat. You can also stunt jump from a helicopter to an airplane if the vehicles are lined up close enough. Of course you don't have to stunt jump, you can also shoot the grappling hook. If you happen to miss? No worries. You can just parachute down to the ground. Or if another airplane comes close enough, you can try to grapple hook it.

Just Cause is structured with 21 core missions that will take approximately 15-20 hours to beat, according to Eidos. There are, however, an inordinate amount of side-missions in the game, for a total of 303 total missions. The core missions must be completed to beat the game, while the side-missions, which do provide a purpose, are not required. They reward players with safe houses, extra cars, weapons, and health. Weapons such as sniper rifles, and gear such as extra ammo and health recharges, and save spots provide a little extra cushion when you're low on ammo or weapons, and more notably, they offer that much-needed save spot for mid-level missions where you need to recharge, switch to a more powerful weapon, or simply stop because your favorite team is playing ball.

Eidos showed us the Xbox 360 version and gave us hands-on time with two levels. The game plays better than it looks. The visuals are rather simple, especially the character designs, with some resemblances to TimeSplitters and GTA. Not bad by any means, just stylistic and leaning toward the simple side. The huge environments favor large spaces over realistic details, even though the Havok physics and excellent lighting offer impressive high-level touches to the game's already colorful atmosphere. The next-gen and PC versions will, naturally, look superior to the PS2 and Xbox versions. That said, the PS2 and Xbox versions are surprisingly good looking despite their inferior specs. What's impressive is how much the team was able to eek out of those aging systems.

Just Cause will ship to all systems on September 27, 2006, and, in case you hadn't guessed, let me spell it out for you: It's a single-player action game that isn't designed for online or co-op play. Sad but true. Those gameplay aspects, we're told, will appear in the sequel that Eidos already has in the works. Nice. In the meantime, check out these kick-ass videos and screenshots. Hopefully, we'll have an even more in-depth preview next week.