Just Cause (Xbox 360)

The stunt system is fun and satisfying when it works, a quick tap of the button will allow Rico to go into stunt mode. He climbs out of the vehicle and leaps atop it, in the case of a car – from here he can leap to another vehicle or climb back in. Rather than explain the stunt system like this, I will illustrate it from a moment of gameplay.

Rico had just been given his coolest piece of equipment yet, the grapple gun, so I was aching to try this one out. I decided that the best way would be to take one of the side missions and see what happened.

I found one of the many side missions for the Guerrillas and it randomly picked an assassination. There was a target on the map I had to kill and it seemed simple enough. It was a fair distance off so I borrowed a car, this happened to be a bit of a mistake since I picked the enemy syndicate’s vehicle to jack.

That gave me a wanted level, so I was forced to shoot the people shooting me. The wanted level went up, the police arrived and I shot them, gaining a wanted level with them as well. I had a wanted level of 2 with the enemy cartel and a wanted level of 3 with the cops.

Rico seemed to be happy about this.

I floored the cartel’s vehicle and shot across the road, taking an off-road direction with cars swarming all around me. The cops kept on coming; I swerved and noticed that the target was actually on a beach over the edge of a cliff. In any other game I wouldn’t have been able to do what I did then.

I hit the stunt position button; the game went into a third person camera as the car shot off the edge of the cliff in slow motion. Rico surfing the bonnet as the other cars followed and plummeted to their doom below.

I popped Rico’s chute and he sailed effortlessly away from the doomed car, both pistols in hand I was able to lock onto the target just as a police helicopter came droning into view – it couldn’t quite get a bead on me. I killed the target with Rico’s twin handguns and whipped out the grapple gun.

The grapple struck home and Rico went sailing towards the chopper as I held down the right trigger, he grabbed onto the tail fin and I took control of the vehicle (yeah, the whole diving through whirling chopper blades made the laws of reality take a hike, but I didn’t care. I was having too much fun).

I checked the mini-map; the mission objective marker had moved and was no longer set on my contact. The further you go into the side missions the further away the return point becomes, sometimes it’s not even the same guy.

A rocket shoots past the chopper and I get things moving, the contact is on the other side of a large mountain range known as Eagle’s Nest. This proves to be harder than I expected since I now have a wanted level of 4 and the cops are bringing out the big guns, four choppers want Rico’s blood and there’s a deadly game of cat and mouse that would make James Bond proud.

I get close to Eagle’s Nest and the chopper takes a bad hit to the rear, it starts to smoke, another hit starts a fire and I bail. Rico freefalls towards the top of the mountain and hits the deck rolling, I keep him running and he makes towards the nearest edge.

A short run down the mountain and Rico rolls a few more times. Machine gun fire rips through the air and Rico’s blasted off his feet by a rocket. He’s hurled up and off the side of the mountain. Most game characters would be dead now. Not Rico, he’s gone into freefall and I manage to guide him down the side of the mountain zipping past the rock and trees.

A few feet from the ground I hit the chute and he soars back into the sky, still under fire from the cops.

This chase goes on for over ten minutes and I have been knocked off course by having to avoid the heat from the cops, then I spot the marker again and drop into freefall. Rico gets close to the ground and the jump to vehicle command pops up. I take control of a small pickup truck and drive it madly towards my destination.

Finally Rico makes it and I sit back with a big smile on my face, adrenaline game moment gold.

It’s stunts like this that elevate a game like Just Cause to a good game, I can suspend my disbelief and enjoy it, because I am having fun and that’s important to me.

The gun combat is simplistic with a generous auto-aim and target system; you can even shoot grenades in mid air and blow them up (yours or the enemies) – a quick tap of the right shoulder button and you switch targets. Some of the vehicles and vessels have inbuilt weapons and the d-pad cycles between them.

You can also click the right stick in for a shoulder-cam view to aim your weapons.